George Orwell's 1984

It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move (1-2). [Book 1, Chapter 1]

"...and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger path and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken houses?" (3). [Book 1, Chapter 1]

"The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures...." (6). [Book 1, Chapter 1]

"All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head...." (7-8). [Book 1, Chapter 1]

"To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction" (17). [Book 1, Chapter 1]

"Repairs, except what you could do for yourself, had to be sanctioned by remote committees which were liable to hold up even the mending of a window pane for two years" (21). [Book 1 Chapter 2]

"Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy's demeanor, that it was not altogether a game" (23). [Book 1, Chapter 2]

"Children always clamored to be taken to see [the hanging of criminals]" (23). [Book 1, Chapter 2]

"Another year, two years, and [those children] would be watching [Mrs. Parsons] night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy" (24). [Book 1, Chapter 2]

"There was no reproach either in their faces or in their hearts, only the knowledge that they must die in order that he might remain alive...." (30-31). [Book 1, Chapter 3]

"With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside" (31). [Book 1, Chapter 3]

"But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control" (34). [Book 1, Chapter 3]

"...to repudiate morality while laying claim to it...." (35). [Book 1, Chapter 3]

"His face remained completely inscrutable" (36). [Book 1, Chapter 3]

"...to apply the same process to the process itself--that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed" (35). [Book 1, Chapter 3]

"It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last" (38). [Book 1, Chapter 4]

"The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one in which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction" (40). [Book 1, Chapter 4]

"And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the Party but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat" (43). [Book 1, Chapter 4]

"Perhaps Withers or someone close to him had been suspected of heretical tendencies" (45). [Book 1, Chapter 4]

"Very occasionally some persons whom you had believed dead long since would make a ghostly reappearance at some public trial where he would implicate hundreds of others by his testimony before vanishing, this time forever" (46). [Book 1, Chapter 4]

"The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that won't become obsolete before the year 2050" (51). [Book 1, Chapter 5]

"A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mention of Big Brother" (52). [Book 1, Chapter 6]

"He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, and up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach" (55). [Book 1, Chapter 5]

"It was curious how that beetlelike type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes" (60). [Book 1, Chapter 5]

"In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense" (62). [Book 1, Chapter 5]

"Only the proles used scent. In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication" (65). [Book 1, Chapter 6]

"By careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them" (68). [Book 1, Chapter 6]

"They were all impregnable, as the Party intended that they should be" (68). [Book 1, Chapter 6]

"It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep loud 'Oh-o-o-o-oh!' that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell" (70). [Book 1, Chapter 7]

"And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances" (72). [Book 1, Chapter 7]

"It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness" (74). [Book 1, Chapter 7]

"All three had written long, abject articles in the Times, analyzing the reasons for their defection and promising to make amends" (76). [Book 1, Chapter 7]

"Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy" (80). [Book 1, Chapter 7]

"The strident voices stopped abruptly. The women studied him in hostile silence as he went past" (83). [Book 1, Chapter 8]

"With the feeling that he would be less conspicuous inside than hanging about on the pavement, he stepped through the doorway" (94). [Book 1, Chapter 8]

He was everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, jollying everyone along with comradely exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body what seemed an inexhaustible supply of acrid-smelling sweat. [Book 2, Chapter 5]

He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided, leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of coughing in the early morning had stopped. [Book 2, Chapter 5]

Now that they had a secure hiding-place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk. [Book 2, Chapter 5]

'If there is hope,' he had written in the diary, 'it lies in the proles.' The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity. [Book 2, Chapter 5]

Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Ingsoc, doublethink, the mutability of the past, and the denial of objective reality, and to use Newspeak words, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing. [Book 2, Chapter 5]

He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance--above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat. [Book 2, Chapter 7]

She did everything that was needed--cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted the mantelpiece--always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion, like an artist's lay-figure moving of its own accord. [Book 2, Chapter 7]

At every meal she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. [Book 2, Chapter 7]

There was a long, nagging argument that went round and round, with shouts, whines, tears, remonstrances, bargainings. [Book 2, Chapter 7]

It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it did not avert the child's death or her own. [Book 2, Chapter 7]

"It had been a rash act to come here at all, and sheer folly to arrive together; though it was true that they had come by different routes and only met on O'Brien's doorstep" (167).

"For what evidence had he in reality that O'Brien was any kind of political conspirator? Nothing but a flash of the eyes and a single equivocal remark: beyond that, only his own secret imaginings, founded on a dream" (169).

"He began asking his questions in a low, expressionless voice, as though this were a routine, a sort of catechism, most of whose answers were known to him already" (172).

"It appeared to Winston that a long time passed before he answered. For a moment he seemed even to have been deprived of the power of speech. His tongue worked soundlessly, forming the opening syllables first of one word, then of the other, over and over again" (173).

"Again O'Brien nodded. With a sort of grave courtesy he completed the stanza" (178).

"...after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces" (180).

"It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies" (180).

"One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed" (181).

"Given this background, one could infer, if one did not know it already, the general structure of Oceanic society. At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful" (208).

"He fell asleep murmuring 'Sanity is not statistical,' with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom" (217).

"He remembered a surly barber arriving to scrape his chin and crop his hair, and businesslike, unsympathetic men in white coats feeling his pulse, tapping his reflexes, turning up his eyelids, running harsh fingers over him in search for broken bones, and shooting needles into his arm to make him sleep" (230).

"It was he who decided when Winston should scream with pain, when he should have a respite, when he should be fed, when he should sleep, when the drugs should be pumped into his arm" (244).

"The grip of his limbs tightened again, but the pain had ebbed away and the trembling had stopped, leaving him merely weak and cold" (251).

"He felt certain that O'Brien was about to twist the dial out of sheer wantonness" (253).

"Even those three miserable traitors in whose innocence you once believed -- Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford -- in the end we broke them down. I took part in their interrogation myself. I saw them gradually worn down, whimpering, grovelling, weeping -- and in the end it was not with pain or fear, only with penitence" (255).

"The dial, also, had grown to be less of a terror. He could evade its pangs if he was quick-witted enough: it was chiefly when he showed stupidity that O'Brien pulled the lever" (261).

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end" (263).

"'I told you, Winston,' he said, 'that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like" (266).

"But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,' he added in a different tone" (266).

"Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible -- and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord" (268).