Quotes from Christopher Isherwood

To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean.

there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.

Now, for example, people with freckles aren't thought of as a minority by the non-freckled. They aren't a minority in the sense we're talking about. And why aren't they? Because a minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary.

The Europeans hate us because we've retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate. We sleep in symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained- and that terrifies them, that fills them with fury and loathing because they can never understand it.

It is strange how people seem to belong to places - especially to places where they were not born...

Because the persecuting majority is vile, says the liberal, therefore the persecuted minority must be stainlessly pure. Can't you see what nonsense that is? What's to prevent the bad from being persecuted by the worse? Did all the Christian victims in the arena have to be saints?

These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood.

Sometimes I wake up in the night when it's cold and wish he was there. You never seem to get really warm, sleeping alone.

I'm afraid, ha, ha, I find more inspiration in the Marquis de Sade.

No. Even now I can't altogether believe that any of this really happened...

their beauty is like the beauty of plants, seemingly untroubled by vanity, anxiety or effort.

He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have to bend your head, even if, like George, you are only five eight. This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely. Nevertheless.

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.

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.

Feeling guilty's no reason for staying, or going.

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

The pain of hunger beneath everything. At the end of all love-making, the dreamless sleep after the orgasm, which is like death.

The other day I made an epigram. I said, Anni's beauty is only sin-deep. I hope that's original? Is it? Please laugh.

They saw themselves as rear-guard individualists, making a last-ditch stand against the twentieth century. They gave thanks loudly from morn till eve that they had escaped the soul destroying commercialism of the city. They were tacky and cheerful and defiantly bohemian, tirelessly inquisitive about each other's doings, and boundlessly tolerant. When they fought, at least it was with fists and bottles and furniture, not lawyers.

It seemed to me then that to have published a book - any kind of book - would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life.

How delightful it is to be here.(Gym) If only one could spend one's entire life in this state of easygoing physical democracy.

There was nothing to be done with him and his kind - unless you were prepared to shoot them.

Fond of bewailing the decadence of the modern world, of denouncing the younger generation for its lack of idealism and public spirit, he is blind to the fact of his own enormous selfishness. He is one of those invalids who make use of their real or imagined sufferings to get their own way.

Biliyor musun, senle ben -garip ÅŸey- ayn? yolun yolcusuyuz asl?nda. Ä°kimizin de evleri biraz büyükçe ama gene de bir bak?ma bize dar geliyor.