Quotes from Christopher Isherwood

The incentive is to fight anarchy. That's all Man lives for. Reclaiming life from its natural muddle. Making patterns." "Patterns for what?" "For the sake of patterns. To create meaning. What else is there?

I mean, I'm not naive enough to imagine that anyone can be satisfied indefinitely by memories, especially if he's young and full of life, like you. I did my best to help you build up a reserve to keep going on.

But we most of us lose our sense of proportion in the presence of a nun; and George, thus exposed at short range to this bride of Christ in her uncompromising medieval habit, finds himself becoming flustered, defensive. An unwilling conscript in Hell's legions, he faces the soldier of Heaven across the front-line of an exceedingly polite cold war.

I walked across the snowy plain of the Tiergarten - a smashed statue here, a newly planted sapling there; the Brandenburger Tor, with its red flag flapping against the blue winter sky; and on the horizon, the great ribs of a gutted railway station, like the skeleton of a whale. In the morning light it was all as raw and frank as the voice of history which tells you not to fool yourself; this can happen to any city, to anyone, to you.

I remember a rainy, depressing afternoon when she remarked 'What a pity we can't make love, there's nothing else to do,' and he agreed that it was and there wasn't.

That's what makes most places utterly impossible - the people. They're so completely hateful. They want everybody to conform to their beastly narrow little way of looking at things. And if one happens not to, one's treated as something unspeakable. And then there's nothing for it but to leave at once.

I have kept this diary doggedly, day by day, because I believe a continuous record, no matter how full of trivialities, will always gradually reveal something of the subconscious mind behind it. I've never regretted keeping a diary yet. There are always a few nuggets of literary value under all that sand.

It's gone! he repeats, almost ecstatically. That's because you let it go, Jacob tells him.

When you want anything badly, you always have to make some sacrifices.

From his angle, the curtain seems to form itself into a shrouded, wavering figure, indescribably terrifying in its very indistinctness. Something waiting, hovering on the threshold of the visible world. Some half-embodied fear gradually assuming a hideous outer form.

Only the very young are not ashamed to arrive panting.)

I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about." Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.

Waldemar made a big sentimental scene with me before he left. He begged me to come with them. I refused. Tears came into his eyes. We Aryans have to stand together, he said. I am sure he said this without thinking. That's the disgusting power of propaganda: the Nazis have scattered such millions of these poisonous words around that you are apt to find one of them unexpectedly inside your own mouth.

The Nazis may write like school boys, but they're capable of anything. People laugh at them right up until the last moment...

All the poetry in the world is in that face.

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.

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.

One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.

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.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home.

If it's going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it's not a world that I want to live in.

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 that's a fact.