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We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.
Christopher Isherwood
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Christopher Isherwood
Age: 81 †
Born: 1904
Born: August 26
Died: 1986
Died: January 4
Autobiographer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
County Palatine of Chester
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood
Philosophy
Remember
Best
Nothing
Borrowers
Must
Really
Belongs
World
Philosophical
Merely
More quotes by Christopher Isherwood
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.
Christopher Isherwood
I am alive, he says to himself, I am alive! And life energy surges hotly through him, and delight, and appetite. How good to be in a body - even this old beat-up carcass - that still has warm blood and live semen and rich marrow and wholesome flesh!
Christopher Isherwood
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.
Christopher Isherwood
By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.
Christopher Isherwood
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.
Christopher Isherwood
Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
Christopher Isherwood
Someone has to ask you a question, George continues meaningly, before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions. Most people aren't that much interested.
Christopher Isherwood
The sea only drowns its lovers.
Christopher Isherwood
Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor.
Christopher Isherwood
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.
Christopher Isherwood
The town is an advertisement for itself none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination.
Christopher Isherwood
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.
Christopher Isherwood
A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary.
Christopher Isherwood
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.
Christopher Isherwood
Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.
Christopher Isherwood
I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.
Christopher Isherwood
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.
Christopher Isherwood
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. I don't know what I'm about.
Christopher Isherwood
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.
Christopher Isherwood
She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.
Christopher Isherwood
