I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.
Interpretation
This quote expresses the idea that individuals are complex and cannot easily understand themselves without external exploration.
Christopher Isherwood's quote reflects on the nature of self-discovery and the complexity of personal identity. Just as a book needs a reader to unpack its meanings, a person often requires external perspectives and experiences to understand their own life and purpose. The quote suggests that self-awareness is a collaborative process, emphasizing that we may not always know our own depths without interaction and reflection.
In practice
In a motivational speech about self-awareness, you might say, 'As Christopher Isherwood reminds us, I'm like a book you have to read.'
The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My "character" is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my "feelings" are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli.
A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary.
What’s so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn’t any difference between people —well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends?
The paternalist is a sentimentalist at heart, and the sentimentalist is always potentially cruel.
I am a camera, with its shutter open. Someday, all of this will be developed, printed, fixed.
I certainly should have,' he agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally-accepted bit of nonsense it is, that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you. As if there weren't far too much understanding in the world already; above all, that understanding between lovers, celebrated in song and story, which is actually such torture that no two of them can bear it without frequent separations or fights.
What would happen if the autism gene was eliminated from the gene pool? You would have a bunch of people standing around in a cave, chatting and socializing and not getting anything done.
Unfortunately for ethical egoism, the claim that we will all be better off if every one of us does what is in his or her own interest is incorrect. This is shown by what are known as "prisoner's dilemma" situations, which are playing an increasingly important role in discussions of ethical theory... At least on the collective level, therefore, egoism is self-defeating - a conclusion well brought out by Parfit in his aforementioned Reasons and Persons.
All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.
The governments alone are responsible for the spread of the superstitious awe with which the common man looks upon every bit of paper upon which the treasury or agencies which it controls have printed the magical words legal tender.
No matter how much fame you have, it's not something that belongs to you. If I'm famous, that doesn't belong to me-that belongs to you. If you can't remember who I am, I'm no longer famous.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.