Quotes from Christopher Isherwood

You're a nice boy, she chuckled harshly. You must come round here one evening. I'll teach you something you didn't know before.

he couldn't, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish he had! His introduction to sexual experience would, I feel sure, have been a masterpiece of tact; it might well have speeded up our development by a good five years.

Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man - all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us - we have died - what is there to be afraid of?It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed." Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

È strano come ogni persona sembri avere un luogo suo… specialmente se non ci è nata.

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

A minority is only thought of a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary.

Wassertorstrasse one week was much like another. Our leaky stuffy little attic smelt of cooking and bad drains. When the living-room stove was alight, we could hardly breathe; when

After many a summer dies the swan.

From 1929 to 1933, [age 25-29] I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I'd met and the experiences I was having. So I kept a detailed diary, which in due course provided raw material for all my Berlin stories. [from preface]

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

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. Their magic consists in this: that whenever they do make a mistake, which is quite often, it is perpetuated and thereby becomes a non-mistake.…

I suppose you've decided I'm a dirty old man?

it's about experience. 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?

Sometimes Arthur talked about his childhood. As a boy he was delicate and had never been sent to school. An only son, he lived alone with his widowed mother, whom me adored. Together they studied literature and art; together they visted Paris, Baden-Baden, Rome, moving always in the best society, from Schloss to château, from château to palace, gentle, charming, appreciative; in a state of perpeutal tender anxiety about each other's health.

v? ??p c?a h? tá»±a nhÆ° v? ??p c?a thá»±c v?t, không b? vÆ°á»›ng b?n b?i nh?ng chuy?n phù hoa, lo l?ng hay ná»— lá»±c.

George makes himself remembers. He is afraid of forgetting. Jim is my life, he says. But he will have to forget, if he wants to go on living. Jim is death.

Women are no good," he told me bitterly. "They spoil everything. They haven't got the spirit of adventure. Men understand each other much better when they're alone together. Uncle Peter (that's our Scoutmaster) says women should stay at home and mend socks. That's all they're fit for!

No time to worry about that now. In ten minutes they will have arrived on campus. In ten minutes, George will have to be George—the George they have named and will recognize. 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 make-up for this role he must play.

It was as crude as his drafts always were. But it accomplished the enormous feat of making this shapeless blob of potential material emerge 'out of the everywhere into here.

He feels a nausea of distaste for them all; then sudden rage. Damn all food. Damn all life. He would like to abandon his shopping-cart, although it's already full of provisions.But that would make extra work for the clerks, and one of them is cute. The alternative, to put the whole lot back in the proper places himself, seems like a labour of Hercules; for the overpowering sloth of sadness is upon him. The sloth that ends in going to bed and staying there until you develop some disease.

We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.

she acted as a kind of rough and ready chemical reagent; in certain combinations she produced certain known results.

Berlin was in a state of civil war. Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon.

Experience isn't any use. And yet, in quite another way, it might be. If only we weren't all such miserable fools and prudes and cowards.