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The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.

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
Sentimentalist
Potentially
Cruel
Heart
Always

More quotes by Christopher Isherwood

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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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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 doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.
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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.
Christopher Isherwood
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Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.
Christopher Isherwood
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Every writer has certain subjects that they write about again and again, and . . . most people's books are just variations on certain themes.
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We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.
Christopher Isherwood
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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
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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
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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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Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
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The sea only drowns its lovers.
Christopher Isherwood
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Hollywood's two polar types are the cynically drunken writer aggressively nursing a ten-year-old reputation and the theatrically self-conscious hermit who strides the boulevard in sandals, home-made shorts and a prophetic beard, muttering against the Age of the Machines.
Christopher Isherwood
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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
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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.
Christopher Isherwood
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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.
Christopher Isherwood
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What’s so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people —well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?
Christopher Isherwood
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The town is an advertisement for itself none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination.
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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.
Christopher Isherwood
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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.
Christopher Isherwood