Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to be loathed? While you’re being persecuted, you hate what’s happening to you, you hate the people who are making it happen; you’re in a world of hate. Why, you wouldn’t recognize love if you met it! You’d suspect love! You’d think there was something behind it—some motive—some trick.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes how persecution can distort one’s perception of love and kindness.
Christopher Isherwood's quote explores the detrimental effects of negative experiences on human emotions and relationships. It suggests that when individuals are subjected to hate or persecution, they develop a deep mistrust towards love, viewing it as potentially insincere or manipulative. This perspective raises questions about the nature of love and hate, indicating that the absence of kindness can lead to a vicious cycle where people fail to recognize genuine affection amidst their suffering.
In practice
During a workshop on emotional resilience, this quote can illustrate how negative experiences affect our relationships.
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?
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.
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.
This industry is tough on relationships. I've always thought that my wife should have a credit up alongside mine because I couldn't do what I do without her support.
I think, really, that the only way a person can open their heart to someone who is so much another is really by knowing them... whether that's in a classroom, or a soccer team, or a food pantry, or any of those things. I mean, we're kind of more alike than we are different.
A peevish self-willed harlotry it is. *She’s a stubborn little brat.*
Marriage was ordained for a remedy and to increase the world and for the man to help the woman and the woman the man, with all love and kindness.
If you deceive someone, you lose one of life's greatest treasures, you lose the capacity to trust. Because without trust, love is not possible.
What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.
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