If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire for a world that values emotions and sentimentality.
Christopher Isherwood's quote reflects a profound belief in the importance of sentiment in human life. It suggests that a world devoid of emotional connection and genuine feelings is undesirable and lacking in humanity. By emphasizing sentiment, Isherwood champions the need for empathy, love, and connection in society, portraying them as essential elements for a fulfilling existence.
In practice
In a speech advocating for emotional intelligence in education, one might say this quote to emphasize the importance of feelings.
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.
Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.' Say not, ' I have found the path of the soul.' Say rather, 'I have met the soul walking upon my path.' For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.
With a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the Iraq war, the US and Australia could ensure every starving, sunken-eyed child on the planet could be well fed, have clean water and sanitation and a local school to go to.
I do not hold to non-violence for moral reasons, but for political and practical reasons.
Let go, and move closer to existence in silence and peace, in meditation.
Let Him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.
Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.
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