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Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.

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
Beauty
Sometimes
Things
Awful

More quotes by 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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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
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The Nazis hated culture itself, because it is essentially international and therefore subversive of nationalism. What they called Nazi culture was a local, perverted, nationalistic cult, by which a few major artists and many minor ones were honored for their Germanness, not their talent.
Christopher Isherwood
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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.
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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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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We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.
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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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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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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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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I'm very militant, you know, in a quite way.
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 it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.
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.
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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Every writer has certain subjects that they write about again and again, and . . . most people's books are just variations on certain themes.
Christopher Isherwood
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Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
Christopher Isherwood
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We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.
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