Quotes About Chrisopher Isherwood
Enjoy collection of 41 Chrisopher Isherwood quotes. Download and share images of famous quotes about Chrisopher Isherwood. Righ click to see and save pictures of Chrisopher Isherwood quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.
The supermarket is still open; it won't close till midnight. It is brilliantly bright. Its brightness offers sanctuary from loneliness and the dark. You could spend hours of your life here, in a state of suspended insecurity, meditating on the multiplicity of things to eat. Oh dear, there is so much! So many brands in shiny boxes, all of them promising you good appetite. Every article on the shelves cries out to you, take me, take me; and the mere competition of their appeals can make you imagine yourself wanted, even loved. But beware - when you get back to your empty room, you'll find that the false flattering elf of the advertisement has eluded you; what remains is only cardboard, cellophane and food. And you have lost the heart to be hungry. ~ Christopher Isherwood
I mean, what is this life of ours supposed to be for? Are we to spend it identifying each other with catalogues, like tourists in an art gallery? Or are we to try to exchange some kind of a signal, however garbled, before it's too late? ~ Christopher Isherwood
I'm very militant, you know, in a quite way. ~ Christopher Isherwood
A grown man who can shed tears without embarrassment is like a yogi who has learned to expel toxic matter from his body by consciously speeding up the peristaltic rhythm. He can eliminate many of life's poisons ~ Christopher Isherwood
(…) there was terror in the Berlin air – the terror felt by many people with good reason – and Christopher found himself affected by it. Perhaps he was also affected by his own fantasies. He had always posed a little to his friends in England as an embattled fighter against the Nazis and some of them had encouraged him jokingly to do so. "Don't get killed before I come," Edward Upward had written, "I'll see you unless you've been shot by Hitler." Now Christopher began to have mild hallucinations. He fancied that he heard heavy wagons drawing up before the house, in the middle of the night. He suddenly detected swastika patterns in the wallpaper. He convinced hinself that everything in his room, whatever its superficial color, was basically brown, Nazi brown. ~ Christopher Isherwood
And again and again I have to remind myself the whole art of life is to lean on people, to involve oneself with them quite fearlessly and yet - when the props are kicked away - remain leaning, as it were, on empty air. Like levitation. ~ Christopher Isherwood
What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament. ~ Christopher Isherwood
By the time it has gotten dressed, it has become he; has become already more or less George - though still not the whole George they demand and are prepared to recognize. Those who call him on the phone at this hour of the morning would be bewildered, maybe even scared, if they could realize what this three-quarters-human thing is what they are talking to. But, of course, they never could - its voice's mimicry of their George is nearly perfect. ~ Christopher Isherwood
For other people, I can't speak - but, personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier - and that's a fact. ~ Christopher Isherwood
Mont Blanc confronted us, dazzling, immense, cut sharp out of the bue sky; more prosterous than the most baroque wedding cake, more convincing than the best photograph. It fairly took my breath away. It made me want to laugh. ~ Christopher Isherwood
The really destructive feature of their relationship is its inherent quality of boredom. It is quite natural for Peter often to feel bored with Otto - they have scarecely a single interest in common - but Peter, for sentimental reasons, will never admit that this is so. When Otto, who has no such motives for pretending, says, "It's so dull here!" I invariably see Peter wince and looked pained. Yet Otto is actually far less often bored than Peter himself; he finds Peter's company genuinely amusing, and is quite glad to be with him most of the day. Often, when Otto has been chattering rubbish for an hour without stopping, I can see that Peter really longs for him to be quiet and go away. But to admit this would be, in Peter's eyes, a total defeat, so he only laughs and rubs his hands, tacitly appealing to me to support him in his pretense of finding Otto inexhaustibly delightful and funny. ~ Christopher Isherwood
You, Christopher, with your centuries of Anglo-Saxon freedom behind you, with your Magna Carta engraved upon your heart, cannot understand that we poor barbarians need the stiffness of a uniform to keep us standing upright. ~ Christopher Isherwood
Up the coast a few miles north, in a lava reef under the cliffs, there are a lot of rock pools. You can visit them when the tide is out. Each pool is separate and different, and you can, if you are fanciful, give them names, such as George, Charlotte, Kenny, Mrs. Strunk. Just as George and the others are thought of, for convenience, as individual entities, so you may think of a rock pool as an entity; though, of course, it is not. The waters of its consciousness - so to speak - are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface light. How can such a variety of creatures co-exist at all? Because they have to. The rocks of the pool hold their world together. And, throughout the day of the ebb tide, they know no other. ~ Christopher Isherwood
John Gielgud told us this story about Mae West. She was asked, 'Do you ever smoke after you've had sex?' She answered, 'I never looked. ~ Christopher Isherwood
I often feel that worse than the most fiendish Nazis were those Germans who went along with the persecution of the Jews not because they really disliked them but because it was the thing. ~ Christopher Isherwood
The pain of hunger beneath everything. At the end of all love-making, the dreamless sleep after the orgasm, which is like death. ~ Christopher Isherwood
Write, live what happens; Life is too sacred for invention – though we may lie about it sometimes, to heighten it. ~ Christopher Isherwood
George feels flattered and excited ... He can't resist slipping into the role Kenny so temptingly offers him. ~ Christopher Isherwood
And at this very moment, like a miracle, the rail-bus appeared. We waved our arms frantically, hardly daring to hope that it would stop. It did stop. We scrambled thankfully on board.
That is the irony of travel. You spend your boyhood dreaming of a magic, impossibly distant day when you will cross the Equator, when your eyes will behold Quito. And then, in the slow prosaic process of life, that day undramatically dawns - and finds you sleepy, hungry and dull. The Equator is just another valley; you aren't sure which and you don't much care. Quito is just another railroad station, with fuss about baggage and taxis and tips. And the only comforting reality, amidst all this picturesque noisy strangeness, is to find a clean pension run by Czech refugees and sit down in a cozy Central European parlor to a lunch of well-cooked Wiener Schnitzel. ~ Christopher Isherwood
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. ~ Christopher Isherwood
The sea only drowns its lovers. ~ Christopher Isherwood
George feels that, even if all this double talk hasn't brought them any closer to understanding each other, the not-understanding, the readiness to remain at cross-purposes, is in itself a kind of intimacy. ~ Christopher Isherwood
No, Geo - underneath all that, Nan really loves me. It's just she wants me to see things her way. You know, she's two years older; that meant a lot when we were children. I've always thought of her as being sort of like a road - I mean, she leads somewhere. With her, I'll never lose my way. ~ Christopher Isherwood
He couldn't, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish he had! His introduction to sexual experience would, I feel sure, have been a masterpiece of tact; it might well have speeded up our development by a good five years. ~ Christopher Isherwood
I must say that I have always felt that, in the deepest sense, we are all brothers. Class distinctions have never meant anything to me; and hatred of tyranny is in my blood. Even as a small child I could never bear injustice of any kind. It offends my sense of the beautiful. It is so stupid and unaesthetic. I remember my feelings when I was first unjustly punished by my nurse. It wasn't the punishment itself which I resented; it was the clumsiness, the lack of imagination behind it. That, I remember, pained me very deeply. ~ Christopher Isherwood
We are not going through an "economy crisis"; we are going through a "spiritual transition". On a deeper level, the collective conscious of humanity is awakening. ~ Christopher Dines
From his angle, the curtain seems to form itself into a shrouded, wavering figure, indescribably terrifying in its very indistinctness. Something waiting, hovering on the threshold of the visible world. Some half-embodied fear gradually assuming a hideous outer form. ~ Christopher Isherwood
But we most of us lose our sense of proportion in the presence of a nun; and George, thus exposed at short range to this bride of Christ in her uncompromising medieval habit, finds himself becoming flustered, defensive. An unwilling conscript in Hell's legions, he faces the soldier of Heaven across the front-line of an exceedingly polite cold war. ~ Christopher Isherwood
It was as crude as his drafts always were. But it accomplished the enormous feat of making this shapeless blob of potential material emerge 'out of the everywhere into here. ~ Christopher Isherwood
What is one ever doing anywhere? ~ Christopher Isherwood
Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to very new régime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about 'Der Führer' to the porters' wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist,she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatizing themselves. After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town. ~ Christopher Isherwood
Cambridge exceeded our most macabre expectations ... the arm-chairs, the crumpets, the beautifully-bound eighteenth century volumes, the fires roaring in stoked grates. Each of us had the loan of an absent undergraduate's rooms - bedroom, sitting-room and pantry; all fitted up in a style which, after the spartan simplicity of a public school study, seemed positively sinful. ~ Christopher Isherwood
But your book is wrong, Mrs. Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife. Jim wasn't a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim, if you'll forgive my saying so, anywhere. ~ Christopher Isherwood
But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until - later of sooner - perhaps - no, not perhaps - quite certainly: it will come. ~ Christopher Isherwood
If it's going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it's not a world that I want to live in. ~ Christopher Isherwood
Despair is something horribly simple. ~ Christopher Isherwood
She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too. ~ Christopher Isherwood
I do and always shall maintain that it is the privilege of the richer but less mentally endowed members of the community to contribute to the upkeep of people like myself. ~ Christopher Isherwood
The prefect evening ... lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy ... Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence. ~ Christopher Isherwood
I was very pink and young and English; and quite prepared for a Continent complete with poisonous drains, roast frogs, bedbugs and vice. ~ Christopher Isherwood
He dislikes even to touch these things, for they are the runes of an idiotic but nevertheless potent and evil magic; the magic of the think-machine gods, whose cult has one dogma - we cannot make a mistake. ~ Christopher Isherwood