Top 90 Christopher Isherwood Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.”

— Christopher Isherwood

2. “Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.”

— Christopher Isherwood

3. “The past is just something that’s over.”

— Christopher Isherwood

4. “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.”

— Christopher Isherwood

5. “California is a tragic country – like Palestine, like every Promised Land.”

— Christopher Isherwood

6. “By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That’s the law of all spiritual progress.”

— Christopher Isherwood

7. “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

— Christopher Isherwood

8. “If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.”

— Christopher Isherwood

9. “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

10. “We live in stirring times- tea-stirring times.”

— Christopher Isherwood

11. “Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination.”

— Christopher Isherwood

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

— Christopher Isherwood

13. “I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.”

— Christopher Isherwood

14. “To say time is evil because evil happens in time is like saying the ocean is a fish because fish happen in the ocean.”

— Christopher Isherwood

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

— Christopher Isherwood

16. “In order to get the worst possible first impression of Los Angeles one should arrive there by bus, preferably in summer and on a Saturday night.”

— Christopher Isherwood

17. “Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor.”

— Christopher Isherwood

18. “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

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

— Christopher Isherwood

20. “I’ll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who’s in the entertainment industry does to some extent.”

— Christopher Isherwood

21. “One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.”

— Christopher Isherwood

22. “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

23. “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

24. “The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they’re capable of anything. That’s just why they’re so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment...”

— Christopher Isherwood

25. “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.”

— Christopher Isherwood

26. “George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.”

— Christopher Isherwood

27. “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.”

— Christopher Isherwood

28. “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

29. “Why do I prefer boys? Because of their shape and their voices and their smell and the way they move. And boys can be so romantic. I can put them into my myth and fall in love with them.”

— Christopher Isherwood

30. “She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatizing themselves. After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.”

— Christopher Isherwood

31. “The town is an advertisement for itself; none of its charms are left to the visitor’s imagination.”

— Christopher Isherwood

32. “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.”

— Christopher Isherwood

33. “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

34. “You see, Kenny, there are some things you don’t even know you know, until you’re asked.”

— Christopher Isherwood

35. “Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.”

— Christopher Isherwood

36. “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

37. “The Quito telephone service is about as reliable as roulette.”

— Christopher Isherwood

38. “She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight – the delight of an addict when someone else admits he’s hooked, too.”

— Christopher Isherwood

39. “There was nothing to be done with him and his kind – unless you were prepared to shoot them.”

— Christopher Isherwood

40. “The game is cruel; but its cruelty is sensual and stirs George into hot excitement. He feels a thrill of pleasure to find the senses so eager in their response; too often, now, they seem sadly jaded. From his heart, he thanks these young animals for their beauty. And they will never know what they have done to make this moment marvelous to him, and life itself less hateful...”

— Christopher Isherwood

41. “The sea only drowns its lovers.”

— Christopher Isherwood

42. “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!”

— Christopher Isherwood

43. “Mont Blanc confronted us, dazzling, immense, cut sharp out of the bue sky; more prosterous than the most baroque wedding cake, more convincing than the best photograph. It fairly took my breath away. It made me want to laugh.”

— Christopher Isherwood

44. “I’m very militant, you know, in a quite way.”

— Christopher Isherwood

45. “No. Even now I can’t altogether believe that any of this really happened...”

— Christopher Isherwood

46. “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

47. “What it sees there isn’t so much a face as the expression of a predicament.”

— Christopher Isherwood

48. “I mean, what is this life of ours supposed to be for? Are we to spend it identifying each other with catalogues, like tourists in an art gallery? Or are we to try to exchange some kind of a signal, however garbled, before it’s too late?”

— Christopher Isherwood

49. “I thought of Natalia: she has escaped – none too soon, perhaps. However often the decision may be delayed, all these people are ultimately doomed. This evening is the dress-rehearsal of a disaster. It is like the last night of an epoch.”

— Christopher Isherwood

50. “I am a quite unnecessarily complicated piece of mechanism.”

— Christopher Isherwood