Christopher Isherwood Quotes

George is very far, right now, from sneering at any of these fellow creatures. They may be crude and mercenary and dull and low, but he is proud, is glad, is almost indecently gleeful to be able to stand up and be counted in their ranks — the ranks of that marvelous minority, The Living. They don't know their luck, these people on the sidewalk, but George knows his — for a little while at least — because he is freshly returned from the icy presence of The Majority, which Doris is to join.

I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life-energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in
a body — even this beat-up carcass — that still has warm blood and semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh! The scowling youths on the corners see him as a dodderer no doubt, or at best as a potential score. Yet he claims a distant kinship with the strength of their young arms and shoulders and loins. For a few bucks he could get any one of them to climb into the car, ride back with him to his house, strip off butch leather jacket, skin-tight Levi's, shirt and cowboy boots and take a naked, sullen young athlete, in the wrestling bout of his pleasure. But George doesn't want the bought unwilling bodies of these boys. He wants to rejoice in his own body — the tough triumphant old body of a survivor. The body that has outlived Jim and is going to outlive Doris.

Chalmers, like many of the English writers whom he then most admired, felt a strong natural sympathy with everything French. At Rouen he imagined himself as having escaped into a world in which it was possible to speak openly and unaffectedly of all those subjects which in England must be introduced by an apology or guarded with a sneer - poetry, metaphysics, romantic love.

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.

That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.

He pictures the evening he might have spent, snugly at home, fixing the food he has bought, then lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself slowly sleepy. At first glance this is an absolutely convincing and charming scene of domestic contentment. Only after a few instants does George notice the omission that makes it meaningless. What is left out of the picture is 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.

The gramophone keeps reiterating a statement about life with which I do not agree.

The Memorial was published on February 17, 1932. . . . I remember how one reviewer remarked that he had at first thought the novel contained a disproportionally large number of homosexual characters but had decided, on further reflection, that there were a lot more homosexuals about, nowadays.

What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they're capable of anything. That's just why they're so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment...

Öyle konular vardır ki yaşamda, sana soruluncaya kadar kendin bile bunları bildiğini bilmezsin.

Everything in the room is like that: unnecessarily solid, abnormally heavy and dangerously sharp.

She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.

I've always made it a rule to have a suit for every day of the week. Perhaps you'll tell me I'm vain, but you'd be surprised if you knew what it had meant to me, at critical moments of my life, to be dressed exactly in accordance with my mood. It gives one such confidence, I think.

Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers.

The Nazis hated culture itself, because it is essentially international and therefore subversive of nationalism. What they called Nazi culture was a local, perverted, nationalistic cult, by which a few major artists and many minor ones were honored for their Germanness, not their talent.