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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6ce1401 | I mean, I'm not naive enough to imagine that anyone can be satisfied indefinitely by memories, especially if he's young and full of life, like you. I did my best to help you build up a reserve to keep going on. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 5c29492 | How could he possibly explain himself to these people? They wanted to learn English for show-off social reasons, or to be able to read Aldous Huxley in the original. Whereas he had learned German simply and solely to be able to talk to his sex partners. For him, the entire German language--all the way from the keep-off-the-grass signs in the park to Goethe's stanza on the wall--was irradiated with sex. For him, the difference between a tabl.. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| b1acc9b | 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 | ||
| fc45eab | I walked across the snowy plain of the Tiergarten - a smashed statue here, a newly planted sapling there; the Brandenburger Tor, with its red flag flapping against the blue winter sky; and on the horizon, the great ribs of a gutted railway station, like the skeleton of a whale. In the morning light it was all as raw and frank as the voice of history which tells you not to fool yourself; this can happen to any city, to anyone, to you. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 87a4b5d | That's what makes most places utterly impossible - the people. They're so completely hateful. They want everybody to conform to their beastly narrow little way of looking at things. And if one happens not to, one's treated as something unspeakable. And then there's nothing for it but to leave at once. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 04d9892 | he begins to feel this utterly mysterious unsensational thing - not bliss, not ecstasy, not joy- das Glueck, le bonheur, la felicidad- they have given it all three genders but one has to admit, however grudgingly, that the Spanish are right, it is usually feminine, that's to say, woman-created. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 8963581 | And so, finding that, for once, I was not sorry to be alone, I said to myself: I am happy. Perfectly happy, I repeated, as my eyes roamed wide over the brilliant desolate sea and the empty contours of the land. Were they, after all, searching for something that was lacking? I hardly knew. A tiny obstinate figure by the dwarf obelisk under an enormous sky, I declared for the third time: I am absolutely happy, absolutely content. And, increas.. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 3bcc63d | Il risveglio comincia con due parole, sono e ora. Poi cio che si e svegliato resta disteso un momento a fissare il soffitto, e se stesso, fino a riconoscere Io, e a dedurne Io sono ora. Qui viene dopo, ed e, almeno in negativo, rassicurante; perche stamattina e qui che ci si aspettava di essere; come dire, a casa. Ma ora non e semplicemente ora. Ora e anche un freddo promemoria; un'intera giornata piu di ieri, un anno piu dell'anno scorso. .. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| abba0a0 | Lo specchio, piu che un volto, riflette l'espressione di una difficolta. Ecco cosa mi sono fatto, ecco il pasticcio che dio sa come ho combinato negli ultimi cinquantotto anni; espresso da uno sguardo opaco e tormentato, da un naso ispessito, da una bocca piegata in una smorfia come per l'acidita delle sue stesse tossine, da guance che cascano dai sostegni muscolari, da una gola che pende floscia in piccole pieghe rugose. Lo sguardo provato.. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 84bd0c2 | sun shines," wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories, "and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends ... are in prison, possibly dead." The" | Erik Larson | ||
| c5213cf | For Christopher, the Cosy Corner was now no longer the mysterious temple of initiation in which he had met Bubi; Berlin was no longer the fantasy city in which their affair had taken place. Their affair had been essentially a private performance which could only continue as long as Wystan was present to be its audience. Now the performance was over. Berlin had become a real city and the Cosy Corner a real bar. He didn't for one moment regre.. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| c1463bc | I like hearing the sound of your voice, but I don't care a bit what you're saying. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| de72a0e | And at this very moment, like a miracle, the rail-bus appeared. We waved our arms frantically, hardly daring to hope that it would stop. It did stop. We scrambled thankfully on board. That is the irony of travel. You spend your boyhood dreaming of a magic, impossibly distant day when you will cross the Equator, when your eyes will behold Quito. And then, in the slow prosaic process of life, that day undramatically dawns--and finds you sleep.. | south-america travel-writing | Christopher Isherwood | |
| 5c9ea4e | He dislikes even to touch these things, for they are the runes of an idiotic but nevertheless potent and evil magic: the magic of the think-machine gods, whose cult has one dogma, We cannot make a mistake. Their magic consists in this: that whenever they do make a mistake, which is quite often, it is perpetuated and thereby becomes a non-mistake.... | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| e299a07 | A story told me by Michael Barrie: Jesus and the Blessed Virgin go out to play golf. The Blessed Virgin is at the top of her form, drives and lands on the green. Jesus slices and lands in the bushes. A squirrel picks up the ball and runs off with it. A dog grab the squirrel, which still holds the ball in its mouth. An eagle swoops down, picks up the dog, squirrel and ball, and soars into the air. Out of a clear sky, lightning strikes the ea.. | gay-authors joke | Christopher Isherwood | |
| d44a859 | My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e3ccc91 | I remember a rainy, depressing afternoon when she remarked 'What a pity we can't make love, there's nothing else to do,' and he agreed that it was and there wasn't. | friendship sex sexuality | Christopher Isherwood | |
| 143ca73 | That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand. | memoir travel-writing | Christopher Isherwood | |
| e08b7da | The usual pronouncement that Truman Capote is a 'birdbrain.' Gore [Vidal] has finished a novel called Two Sisters in which he admits that he and Jack Kerouac went to bed together--or was that in an article? (Gore told me about so many articles he's written and talks he has given that my memory spins.) Anyhow, Gore now regrets that he didn't describe the act itself; how they got very drunk and Kerouac said, 'Why don't we take a shower?' and .. | gay-authors memoirs | Christopher Isherwood | |
| 9bd51b2 | I have kept this diary doggedly, day by day, because I believe a continuous record, no matter how full of trivialities, will always gradually reveal something of the subconscious mind behind it. I've never regretted keeping a diary yet. There are always a few nuggets of literary value under all that sand. | gay-men writing | Christopher Isherwood | |
| 54f5478 | George feels a kind of patriotism for the freeways. He is proud that they are so fast, that people get lost on them and even sometimes panic and have to bolt for safety down the nearest cutoff. George loves the freeways because he can still cope with them; because the fact that he can cope proves his claim to be a functioning member of society. He can still get by. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 7bcf1d0 | He feels a nausea of distaste for them all; then sudden rage. Damn all food. Damn all life. He would like to abandon his shopping-cart, although it's already full of provisions.But that would make extra work for the clerks, and one of them is cute. The alternative, to put the whole lot back in the proper places himself, seems like a labour of Hercules; for the overpowering sloth of sadness is upon him. The sloth that ends in going to bed an.. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 97c29f3 | From his angle, the curtain seems to form itself into a shrouded, wavering figure, indescribably terrifying in its very indistinctness. Something waiting, hovering on the threshold of the visible world. Some half-embodied fear gradually assuming a hideous outer form. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 2cff758 | I saw it all suddenly while I was reading . . . Forster's the only one who understands what the modern novel ought to be . . . Our frightful mistake was that we believed in tragedy: the point is, tragedy's quite impossible nowadays . . . We ought to aim at being essentially comic writers . . . The whole of Forster's technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones th.. | memoir | Christopher Isherwood | |
| 5aa796f | Katherine Anne [Porter] treated them like favored nephews; she even cooked meals for them. Unfortunately, however, beneath Christopher's deference and flattery, there was a steadily growing aggression. By her implicit claim to be the equal of Katherine Mansfield and even Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne had stirred up Christopher's basic literary snobbery. , he began to mutter to himself, this vain old frump, this dressed-up cook in her arty.. | gossip memoir | Christopher Isherwood | |
| 87b4496 | Mr. Pilates was a bully and a narcissist and a dirty old man; he and Christopher got along very well. When Christopher was doing his workout, Pilates would bring one of his assistants over to watch, rather as the house surgeon brings an intern to study a patient with a rare deformity. 'Look at him!' Pilates would exclaim to the assistant, 'That could have been a beautiful body, and look what he's done to it! Like a birdcage that somebody tr.. | gossip memoirs | Christopher Isherwood | |
| c2dc65a | The other day I made an epigram. I said, Anni's beauty is only sin-deep. I hope that's original? Is it? Please laugh. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| ae3a12f | you may think of a rock pool as an entity; though, of course, it is not. The waters of its consciousness--so to speak--are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface light. How can such a variety of creatures coexist at all? Because.. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 8372624 | property association dues, they scooped up their dogs' shit into little plastic bags as to not offend their neighbors, and their kids surely played sports not just in high school leagues but in private county leagues. The world was their oyster. They felt safe. Sure, they locked their doors and set their alarms, but ultimately, they felt safe. That was about to change. He walked up a particular lawn. Surely she would be home now. Her husban.. | Blake Pierce | ||
| 3dbbed9 | Thanks," she said. "But I think my roots here are too thick. I feel like it's too late." | Blake Pierce | ||
| 84273f4 | So now George has arrived. He is not nervous in the least. As he gets out of his car, he feels an upsurge of energy, of eagerness for the play to begin. And he walks eagerly, with a springy step, along the gravel path past the Music Building toward the Department office. He is all actor now--an actor on his way up from the dressing room, hastening through the backstage world of props and lamps and stagehands to make his entrance. A v.. | reaffirmation-of-faith religious | Christopher Isherwood | |
| e2511ac | A minority is only thought of a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 4b827cf | After many a summer dies the swan. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 7b1ceda | 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. | reality | Christopher Isherwood | |
| 9e26cef | ve dep cua ho tua nhu ve dep cua thuc vat, khong bi vuong ban boi nhung chuyen phu hoa, lo lang hay no luc. | green pure | Christopher Isherwood | |
| 3700b3a | 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. | pretend | Christopher Isherwood | |
| 72a29d2 | Orada gordugu, bir yuzden cok, berbat bir yuz ifadesi. Iste o yuzun kendine ettikleri, yasadigi elli sekiz yil boyunca nasilsa icine dusmeyi basardigi berbat durum; anlatimini donuk yorgun gozlerde, sis bir burunda, sanki kendi toksinlerinin eksikligiyle kenarlarindan asagi cekilip buzulmus bir agizda, kaslarinin palamarindan cozulmus sarkan yanaklarda, kucuk kucuk kirisikliklarla kat kat olup sarkmis boyunda bulan bir perisanlik. Olesiye y.. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 8d97a60 | Azinliklar buyuk olasilikla bizlerden farkli gorunen, davranan, dusunen ve bizde olmayan kusurlari olan insanlardir. Onlarin gorunuslerinden, davranislarindan hoslanmayabilir, kusurlarindan nefret edebiliriz. Ayrica, neler hissettigimizi guya liberal bir duygusallikla ortmeye calismaktansa, onlardan hoslanmadigimizi, nefret ettigimizi itiraf etmek daha iyidir. Duygularimizi acikca disari vursak, bir emniyet subabimiz olursa da yargilamaya k.. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 13c666a | Baski uygulayan cogunluk kotu olduguna gore, der liberal kisi, demek ki baski goren grup sutten cikma ak kasik olmalidir. Bu nasil bir sacmaliktir, farkinda misiniz? Kotunun kendisinden daha kotu olanlar tarafindan baski altina alinmasi olmayacak sey mi? Arenadaki butun Hiristiyan kurbanlar aziz mi olmalilar? | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 3415d38 | Azinligin da kendine gore bir saldirganligi vardir. Cogunluga kafa tutar, kendisine saldirilsin ister. Cogunluktan nefret eder -nedensiz degil tabi, onu teslim ediyorum. Hatta oteki azinliklardan bile nefret eder, cunku butun azinliklar birbirlerine rakiptir; her biri kendi cektiklerinin en kotusu, kendi ugradigi haksizliklarin en agiri oldugunu one surer. Daha cok nefret ettikce, daha cok baski gorurler, daha da aksilesirler! O halde, her .. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 029097c | Oyle konular vardir ki yasamda, sana soruluncaya kadar kendin bile bunlari bildigini bilmezsin. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 831590e | Christopher Isherwood tried to trick a good topic into rising from his unconscious by irritating it, "deliberately writing nonsense until it intervenes, as it were, saying, 'All right, you idiot, let me fix this." | Ralph Keyes | ||
| cf1f09b | They have planned a life for you - from the cradle to the grave and beyond - which it would be easy, fatally easy, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist's command. Wake up, wake up - before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don't really want, marry that gir.. | Christopher Isherwood | ||
| 07f3bca | I am a camera with its shutter open | Christopher Isherwood |