Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesnโt! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While youโre being persecuted, you hate whatโs happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; youโre in a world of hate. Why, you wouldnโt recognize love if you met it! Youโd suspect love! Youโd think there was something behind itโsome motiveโsome trick.
Christopher IsherwoodYou see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.
Christopher IsherwoodShe is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.
Christopher IsherwoodThe 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.
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