Lions and Shadows Quotes

“I hadn't even the necessary credentials for schoolmastering - that last refuge of the unsuccessful literary man”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“It seemed to me then that to have published a book - any kind of book - would be the greatest possible happiness I could ask from life.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“There was nothing to be done with him and his kind - unless you were prepared to shoot them.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“I was very pink and young and English; and quite prepared for a Continent complete with poisonous drains, roast frogs, bedbugs and vice.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“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, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“If you really have talent, you know, you'll go on writing - whatever people say to you.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“... he couldn't, as a respectable master in an English public school, have taken us to a brothel. Yet how I wish he had! His introduction to sexual experience would, I feel sure, have been a masterpiece of tact; it might well have speeded up our development by a good five years.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about Taffreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire ... Needless to say, Chalmers and myself were both virgins, in every possible meaning of the word.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“Chalmers, like many of the English writers whom he then most admired, felt a strong natural sympathy with everything French. At Rouen he imagined himself as having escaped into a world in which it was possible to speak openly and unaffectedly of all those subjects which in England must be introduced by an apology or guarded with a sneer - poetry, metaphysics, romantic love.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“Finally, after a glance at Notre Dame and a brisk trot through the Louvre, we sat down at a cafe on the Place de l'Opera and watched the people. They were amazing -- never had we seen such costumes, such make-up, such wigs; and, strangest of all, the wearers didn't seem in the least conscious of how funny they looked. Many of them even stared at us and smiled, as though we had been the oddities, and not they. Mr. Holmes no doubt found it amusing to see the pageant of prostitution, poverty and fashion reflected in our callow faces and wide-open eyes.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“Cambridge exceeded our most macabre expectations ... the arm-chairs, the crumpets, the beautifully-bound eighteenth century volumes, the fires roaring in stoked grates. Each of us had the loan of an absent undergraduate's rooms - bedroom, sitting-room and pantry; all fitted up in a style which, after the spartan simplicity of a public school study, seemed positively sinful.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“I saw it all suddenly while I was reading Howards End . . . 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 them down until they sound like mothers’-meeting gossip . . . In fact, there’s actually less emphasis laid on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones: that’s what’s so utterly terrific. It’s the completely new kind of accentuation—like a person talking a different language . . . .”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties

“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, increasingly overcome by a profound melancholy which I interpreted simply as an appetite for supper I began to walk downhill, towards my sitting room, my holiday task and my lonely bed.”
― Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties