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"They keep telling you, when you’re older, you’ll have experience — and that’s supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it rea… - Christopher Isherwood
"They keep telling you, when you’re older, you’ll have experience — and that’s supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?"
"What kind of experience?”
“Well — places you’ve been to, people you’ve met. Situations you’ve been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that’s supposed to make you wise, in your later years.”
“Let me tell you something, Kenny. 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 sillier — and that’s a fact.”
“No kidding, sir? You can’t mean that! You mean, sillier than when you were young?”
“Much, much sillier.”
“I’ll be darned. Then experience is no use at all? You’re saying it might just as well not have happened?”
“No. I’m not saying that. I only mean, you can’t use it. But if you don’t try to — if you just realize it’s there and you’ve got it — then it can be kind of marvelous."
English
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About Christopher Isherwood
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was a British-American writer.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood
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Additional quotes by 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.
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But George knows he can't do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself, almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope is not false. No. It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real.
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