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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
World
Philosophical
Merely
Philosophy
Remember
Best
Nothing
Must
Borrowers
Really
Belongs

More quotes by Christopher Isherwood

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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.
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The Quito telephone service is about as reliable as roulette.
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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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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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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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We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.
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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.
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The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.
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Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
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I feel it's so easy to condemn this country [the United States] but they don't understand that this is where the mistakes are being made - and made first, so that we're going to get the answers first.
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By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.
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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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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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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.
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I'm very militant, you know, in a quite way.
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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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The sea only drowns its lovers.
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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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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.
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Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.
Christopher Isherwood