Top 90 Christopher Isherwood Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “But your book is wrong, Mrs. Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife. Jim wasn’t a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim, if you’ll forgive my saying so, anywhere.”

— Christopher Isherwood

52. “Lois and Alexander are by far the most beautiful creatures in the class; their beauty is like the beauty of plants, seemingly untroubled by vanity, anxiety or effort.”

— Christopher Isherwood

53. “But George knows he can’t do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself, almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope is not false. No. It’s just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real.”

— Christopher Isherwood

54. “That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.”

— Christopher Isherwood

55. “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

56. “I’m afraid, ha, ha, I find more inspiration in the Marquis de Sade.”

— Christopher Isherwood

57. “The couples were dancing with hands on each other’s hips, yelling in each other’s faces, streaming with sweat. An orchestra in Bavarian costume whooped and drank and perspired beer. The place stank like beer.”

— Christopher Isherwood

58. “Now, for example, people with freckles aren’t thought of as a minority by the non-freckled. They aren’t a minority in the sense we’re talking about. And why aren’t they? Because a minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of a threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary.”

— Christopher Isherwood

59. “Do women ever stop trying? No. But, because they never stop, they learn to be good losers.”

— Christopher Isherwood

60. “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!”

— Christopher Isherwood

61. “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.”

— Christopher Isherwood

62. “These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, acording to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly – despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public – to put him to bed, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.”

— Christopher Isherwood

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

— Christopher Isherwood

64. “Well, I think you’ll find that the soft ones object to being cheated even more than the others. They mind it more because they feel that they’ve only themselves to blame.”

— Christopher Isherwood

65. “Most of the time, thank goodness, we suffer quite stupidly and unreflectingly, like the animals.”

— Christopher Isherwood

66. “This bright place isn’t really a sanctuary. For, ambushed among its bottles and cartons and cans, are shockingly vivid memories of meals shopped for, cooked, eaten with Jim. They stab out at George as he passes, pushing his shopping cart. Should we ever feel truly lonely if we never ate alone?”

— Christopher Isherwood

67. “Remorse is not for the elderly. When it comes to them it is not purging or uplifting, but merely degrading and wretched, like a bladder disease.”

— Christopher Isherwood

68. “Feeling guilty’s no reason for staying, or going.”

— Christopher Isherwood

69. “George feels that, even if all this double talk hasn’t brought them any closer to understanding each other, the not-understanding, the readiness to remain at cross-purposes, is in itself a kind of intimacy.”

— Christopher Isherwood

70. “British Imperialism has been engaged, during the last two hundred years, in conferring upon its victims the dubious benefits of the Bible, the Bottle and the Bomb. And of these three, I might perhaps venture to add, the Bomb has been infinitely the least noxious.”

— Christopher Isherwood

71. “I like hearing the sound of your voice, but I don’t care a bit what you’re saying.”

— Christopher Isherwood

72. “No one ever hates without a cause...”

— Christopher Isherwood

73. “Oh, I know you. You’re soft, like most men. You make up romances about people instead of seeing them as they are.”

— Christopher Isherwood

74. “This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely.”

— Christopher Isherwood

75. “Write, live what happens; Life is too sacred for invention – though we may lie about it sometimes, to heighten it.”

— Christopher Isherwood

76. “Even when they are geniuses in spite of it, their masterpieces are invariably warped.”

— Christopher Isherwood

77. “What is one ever doing anywhere?”

— Christopher Isherwood

78. “I hadn’t even the necessary credentials for schoolmastering – that last refuge of the unsuccessful literary man.”

— Christopher Isherwood

79. “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

80. “Sometimes I wake up in the night when it’s cold and wish he was there. You never seem to get really warm, sleeping alone.”

— Christopher Isherwood

81. “After many a summer dies the swan.”

— Christopher Isherwood

82. “It is strange how people seem to belong to places – especially to places where they were not born...”

— Christopher Isherwood

83. “I’m trying a new kind of stew, as a matter of fact. I got the idea from a marvellous travel-book Myrna Custer just brought me – about Borneo. Only the author gets slightly vague, so I’ve had to improvise a bit. I mean, he doesn’t come right out and say so, but I have a suspicion that one’s supposed to make it with human flesh. Actually, I’ve used leftovers from a joint –.”

— Christopher Isherwood

84. “No time to worry about that now. In ten minutes they will have arrived on campus. In ten minutes, George will have to be George – the George they have named and will recognize. 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 make-up for this role he must play.”

— Christopher Isherwood

85. “Wassertorstrasse one week was much like another. Our leaky stuffy little attic smelt of cooking and bad drains. When the living-room stove was alight, we could hardly breathe; when.”

— Christopher Isherwood

86. “George makes himself remembers. He is afraid of forgetting. Jim is my life, he says. But he will have to forget, if he wants to go on living. Jim is death.”

— Christopher Isherwood

87. “Charlotte, meanwhile, has peeked into the oven and then closed its door again, announcing, ‘twenty more minutes’ with the absolute confidence of a great chef, which by God she isn’t.”

— Christopher Isherwood

88. “I am a camera with its shutter open.”

— Christopher Isherwood

89. “Berlin was in a state of civil war. Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon.”

— Christopher Isherwood

90. “The pension was run by a happy-go-lucky Englishman, who used to laugh at my industry and tell me I ought to go swimming, while I was still young. “After all, old boy, I mean to say, will it matter a hundred years from now if you wrote that yarn or not?”

— Christopher Isherwood

91. “The harassed look...”

— Christopher Isherwood

92. “I suppose you’ve decided I’m a dirty old man?”

— Christopher Isherwood

93. “I think’, said Sally, ’it must be marvellous to be a novelist. You’re frightfully dreamy and unpractical and unbusinesslike, and people imagine they can fairly swindle you as much as they want – and then you sit down and write a book about them which fairly shows them what swine they all are, and it’s the most terrific success and you make pots of money.”

— Christopher Isherwood

94. “You, Christopher, with your centuries of Anglo-Saxon freedom behind you, with your Magna Carta engraved upon your heart, cannot understand that we poor barbarians need the stiffness of a uniform to keep us standing upright.”

— Christopher Isherwood

95. “Meanwhile, Ruskin has completely lost his wig.”

— Christopher Isherwood