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Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.

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
Called
Silliness
Intelligent
Capable
Truly

More quotes by 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.
Christopher Isherwood
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I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.
Christopher Isherwood
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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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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'm very militant, you know, in a quite way.
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
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Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.
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.
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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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
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We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.
Christopher Isherwood
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The sea only drowns its lovers.
Christopher Isherwood
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The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.
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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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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The town is an advertisement for itself none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination.
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.
Christopher Isherwood
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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.
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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You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.
Christopher Isherwood