Christopher Isherwood
Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Attitude
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.
California is a tragic country - like Palestine, like every Promised Land.
I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent.
One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.
A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp. And the world seems so fresh as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.Collection: Thinking
We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.Collection: Philosophy
Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.Collection: Intelligent
I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.Collection: Cameras
By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.Collection: Spiritual
Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.Collection: Awful
I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.Collection: Doubt
Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Book
Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other’s bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love – think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them!Collection: Mistake
We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.Collection: Tea
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Nazi
It seems to me that the real clue to your sexual orientation lies in your romantic feelings rather than your sexual feelings. If you are really gay, you are able to fall in love with a man, not just enjoy sex with him.Collection: Falling In Love
The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.Collection: Heart
If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.Collection: World
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.Collection: Men
The sea only drowns its lovers.Collection: Sea
The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My "character" is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my "feelings" are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli.Collection: Atheist
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.Collection: Artist
Every writer has certain subjects that they write about again and again, and . . . most people's books are just variations on certain themes.Collection: Book
The town is an advertisement for itself; none of its charms are left to the visitor's imagination.Collection: Imagination
The landscape, like Los Angeles itself, is transitional. Impermanence haunts the city, with its mushroom industries--the aircraft perpetually becoming obsolete, the oil which must one day be exhausted, the movies which fill America's theatres for six months and are forgotten. Many of its houses--especially the grander ones--have a curiously disturbing atmosphere, a kind of psychological dankness which smells of anxiety, overdrafts, uneasy lust, whisky, divorce and lies.Collection: Lying
No one ever hates without a cause.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Skeletons
The past is just something that's over.Collection: Past
For other people, I can't speak - but, personally, I haven't gotten wise on anything. Certainly, I've been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn't seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier - and that's a fact.Collection: Wise
In the eternal lazy morning of the Pacific, days slip away into months, months into years; the seasons are reduced to the faintest nuance by the great central fact of the sunshine; one might pass a lifetime, it seems, between two yawns, lying bronzed and naked in the sand.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Believe
Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man - all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us - we have died - what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Morning
Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.Collection: Hate
The prefect evening...lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy...Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence.Collection: Lying
Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.Collection: Causes
She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.Collection: Delight
The talk of pale, burning-eyed students, anarchists and utopians all, over tea and cigarettes in a locked room long past midnight, is next morning translated, with the literalness of utter innocence, into the throwing of the bomb, the shouting of the proud slogan, the dragging away of the young dreamer-doer, still smiling, to the dungeon and the firing squad.Collection: Morning
George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.Collection: Crazy
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.Collection: People
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!Collection: Blood
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?Collection: Morning
I must honor those who fight of their own free will, he said to himself. And I must try to imitate their courage by following my path as a pacifist, wherever it takes me.Collection: Fighting
But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until — later of sooner — perhaps — no, not perhaps — quite certainly: it will come.Collection: Past
I'm horrified to find, as I look at these diaries of twenty-five years ago or more, that I don't remember who the people were. "Bill and Tony were constantly in and out. We went to La Jolla" - or something. I haven't the bluest idea who they were!Collection: Years
I'm very militant, you know, in a quite way.Collection: Way