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.
I think that women of color use social media to make our voices heard with or without the amplification of white women. I also think that, many times, when white women want our support, they use an umbrella of 'women supporting women' and forget that they didn't lend the same kind of support.
I was assigned male at birth, is the way I like to put it, because I think... we're born who we are... and the gender thing is something someone imposes on you. And so, I was assigned male at birth, but I always felt like I was a girl.
I don’t want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.
Where there is no love, a person's faithfulness to the marriage bond is probably against nature.
And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.
The obligation to receive reduces our ability to choose whom we wish to be indebted to and puts that power in the hands of others.
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