The Berlin Stories Quotes

“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, The Berlin Stories

“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, The Berlin Stories

“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, The Berlin Stories

“Most rich people, once they have decided to trust you at all, can be imposed upon to almost any extent.”
― Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories

“In a few days, I thought, we shall have forfeited all kinship with ninety-nine per cent of the population of the world, with the men and women who earn their living, who insure their lives, who are anxious about the future of their children. Perhaps in the Middle Ages people felt like this, when they believed themselves to have sold their souls to the Devil. It was a curious, exhilarating, not unpleasant sensation: but, at the same time, I felt slightly scared. Yes, I said to myself, I’ve done it, now. I am lost.”
― Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories

“Comparing the two cities — the Berlin I knew in the early thirties and the Berlin I revisited in the early fifties — I have to admit that the latter is, in many respects, a far more exciting setting for a novel or a sequence of stories. Life in the Berlin of 1952 had an intensely dramatic doubleness. Here was a shadow-line cutting a city in half — a frontier between two worlds at war — across which people were actually being kidnapped, to disappear into prisons or graves. And yet this shadow-frontier was being freely crossed in the most humdrum manner every day, on foot, in buses, or in electric trains, by thousands of Berliners commuting back and forth between their work and their homes. Many men and women who lived in West Berlin were on the black list of the East German police; and, if the Russians had suddenly marched in, they couldn’t have hoped to escape. Yet, in this no man’s land between the worlds, you heard the usual talk about business and sport, the new car, the new apartment, the new lover.”
― Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories

“I am a camera with its shutter open”
― Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories

“From 1929 to 1933, [age 25-29] I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I’d met and the experiences I was having. So I kept a detailed diary, which in due course provided raw material for all my Berlin stories. [from preface]”
― Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories

“From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and secondhand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.”
― Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories

“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, The Berlin Stories

“Women are no good,” he told me bitterly. “They spoil everything. They haven’t got the spirit of adventure. Men understand each other much better when they’re alone together. Uncle Peter (that’s our Scoutmaster) says women should stay at home and mend socks. That’s all they’re fit for!”
― Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories

“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, The Berlin Stories

“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, The Berlin Stories