Christopher Isherwood Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
-
“We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“Someone has to ask you a question," George continues meaningly, "before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions. Most people aren't that much interested....”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
-
“What irritates me is the bland way people go around saying, 'Oh, our attitude has changed. We don't dislike these people any more.' But by the strangest coincidence, they haven't taken away the injustice; the laws are still on the books.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination.”
-- Christopher IsherwoodSource : Christopher Isherwood (1987). “The Wishing Tree: Christopher Isherwood on Mystical Religion”, Vedanta Press
-
“It seems to me that the real clue to your sexual orientation lies in your romantic feelings rather than your sexual feelings. If you are really gay, you are able to fall in love with a man, not just enjoy sex with him.”
-- Christopher IsherwoodSource : Interview with Winston Leyland on 1973. "Conversations with Christopher Isherwood". Book edited by James J. Berg and Chris Freeman, p. 106, 2001.
-
“But seriously, I believe I'm a sort of Ideal Woman, if you know what I mean. I'm the sort of woman who can take men away from their wives, but I could never keep anybody for long. And that's because I'm the type which every man imagines he wants, until he gets me; and then he finds he doesn't really, after all.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
-
“Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.”
-- 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 -
“Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.”
-- Christopher IsherwoodSource : Christopher Isherwood, James J. Berg, Chris Freeman (2001). “Conversations with Christopher Isherwood”, p.171, Univ. Press of Mississippi
-
“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 -
-
“Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other’s bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love – think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them!”
-- Christopher IsherwoodSource : Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, James P. White (1989). “Where Joy Resides: An Isherwood Reader”, Vintage
-
“Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“Every writer has certain subjects that they write about again and again, and . . . most people's books are just variations on certain themes.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
-
“The Quito telephone service is about as reliable as roulette.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“For a few minutes, maybe, life lingers in the tissues of some outlying regions of the body. Then, one by one, the lights go out and there is total blackness. And if some part of the non-entity we called George has indeed been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there on the deep water, then it will return to find itself homeless.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.”
-- Christopher IsherwoodSource : Christopher Isherwood (2008). “The Berlin Stories”, p.18, New Directions Publishing
-
“The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My "character" is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my "feelings" are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
-
“Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“Hollywood's two polar types are the cynically drunken writer aggressively nursing a ten-year-old reputation and the theatrically self-conscious hermit who strides the boulevard in sandals, home-made shorts and a prophetic beard, muttering against the Age of the Machines.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“In order to get the worst possible first impression of Los Angeles one should arrive there by bus, preferably in summer and on a Saturday night.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“The landscape, like Los Angeles itself, is transitional. Impermanence haunts the city, with its mushroom industries--the aircraft perpetually becoming obsolete, the oil which must one day be exhausted, the movies which fill America's theatres for six months and are forgotten. Many of its houses--especially the grander ones--have a curiously disturbing atmosphere, a kind of psychological dankness which smells of anxiety, overdrafts, uneasy lust, whisky, divorce and lies.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
-
“To live sanely in Los Angeles ... you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“I seldom try to probe the mystery of my sloth. I have squandered a gigantic fortune of work hours... seems likely that I'll go on squandering till the very end.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“I certainly should have,' he agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally-accepted bit of nonsense it is, that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you. As if there weren't far too much understanding in the world already; above all, that understanding between lovers, celebrated in song and story, which is actually such torture that no two of them can bear it without frequent separations or fights.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“As they embrace, she kisses him full on the mouth. And suddenly sticks her tongue right in. She has done this before, often. It’s one of those drunken long shots which just might, at least theoretically, once in ten thousand tries, throw a relationship right out of its orbit and send it whizzing off on another. Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers.”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
-
“What’s so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people —well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?”
-- Christopher Isherwood -
“The talk of pale, burning-eyed students, anarchists and utopians all, over tea and cigarettes in a locked room long past midnight, is next morning translated, with the literalness of utter innocence, into the throwing of the bomb, the shouting of the proud slogan, the dragging away of the young dreamer-doer, still smiling, to the dungeon and the firing squad.”
-- Christopher Isherwood
You may also like:
-
Aldous Huxley
Writer -
Bob Fosse
Actor -
Colin Firth
Film actor -
E. M. Forster
Novelist -
Evelyn Waugh
Writer -
Fred Ebb
Lyricist -
Gore Vidal
Writer -
Joel Grey
Actor -
John Kander
Composer -
Julie Harris
Actress -
Liza Minnelli
Actress -
Matt Smith
Actor -
Matthew William Goode
Actor -
Michael York
Actor -
Stephen Spender
Poet -
Tom Ford
Fashion designer -
Truman Capote
Author -
W. H. Auden
Poet -
Jay Presson Allen
Screenwriter
