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 IsherwoodHorror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.
Christopher IsherwoodFor 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 nonโentity 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 IsherwoodWe must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers.
Christopher IsherwoodShe is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.
Christopher IsherwoodBerlin 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.
Christopher Isherwood