Christopher Isherwood Quotes
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Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.
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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.
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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 ifsome 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.
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California is a tragic country - like Palestine, like every Promised Land.
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I'm horrified to find, as I look at these diaries of twenty-five years ago or more, that I don't remember who the people were. "Bill and Tony were constantly in and out. We went to La Jolla" - or something. I haven't the bluest idea who they were!
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What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.
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I'm very militant, you know, in a quite way.
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I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent.
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Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor.
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California is a tragic country — like Palestine, like every Promised Land. Its short history is a fever-chart of migrations — the land rush, the gold rush, the oil rush, the movie rush, the Okie fruit-picking rush, the wartime rush to the aircraft factories — followed, in each instance, by counter-migrations of the disappointed and unsuccessful, moving sorrowfully homeward.
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I must honor those who fight of their own free will, he said to himself. And I must try to imitate their courage by following my path as a pacifist, wherever it takes me.
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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.
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If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.
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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.
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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.
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Lois and Alexander are by far the most beautiful creatures in the class; their beauty is like the beauty of plants, seemingly untroubled by vanity, anxiety or effort.
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The Nazis were not right to hate the Jews. But their hating of Jews was not without a cause. No one ever hates without a cause.
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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.
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George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.
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I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.
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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.
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In ten minutes they will have arrived on campus. George will have to be George; the George they have named and will recognise. So now he consciously applies himself to thinking their thoughts, getting into their mood. With the skill of a veteran, he rapidly puts on the psychological makeup for this role he must play.
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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.
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One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.
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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.
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She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.
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