Quote

I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.

Christopher Isherwood

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Needs
Urgently
Accepts
Accepting
Doubt
Belief
Ever

More quotes by Christopher Isherwood

Image
You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.
Christopher Isherwood
Image
The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.
Christopher Isherwood
Image
She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.
Christopher Isherwood
Image
By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.
Christopher Isherwood
Image
Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.
Christopher Isherwood
Image
Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.
Christopher Isherwood
Image
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
Image
The sea only drowns its lovers.
Christopher Isherwood
Image
What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.
Christopher Isherwood
Image
We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.
Christopher Isherwood
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The town is an advertisement for itself none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination.
Christopher Isherwood
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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