Dorian Lynskey > Quotes

“Margaret Atwood started writing The Handmaid’s Tale in West Berlin in the spring of 1984. Like Orwell when he began Nineteen Eighty-Four, she was in her early forties and she knew exactly what she wanted to say. The novel originated with a file of newspaper cuttings she had begun collecting while living in England, covering such topics as the religious right, prisons in Iran, falling birth rates, Nazi sexual politics, polygamy and credit cards. She let these diverse observations ferment, like compost, until a story grew out of them. Her travels in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, where she experienced “the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information,” nourished the novel, too, as did her adolescent obsession with dystopias and World War Two.”
― Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984

“Why did Orwell criticise communism so much more energetically than fascism? Because he had seen it up close, and because its appeal was more treacherous. Both ideologies reached the same totalitarian destination but communism began with nobler aims and therefore required more lies to sustain it. It became “a form of Socialism that makes mental honesty impossible,” and its literature “a mechanism for explaining away mistakes.” He”
― Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?’ asks Emily in Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town. The answer, of course, is no. How could we? It’s all we’ve ever known. But contemplating the end can help.”
― Dorian Lynskey, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World

“«La esencia de ser humano es que uno no busca la perfección —escribió—, que uno a veces está dispuesto a cometer pecados por lealtad, que uno no lleva el ascetismo hasta el punto en el que se vuelve imposible la convivencia amistosa, y que uno está preparado para ser finalmente derrotado y despedazado por la vida, lo cual es el precio inevitable de depositar su amor en otros seres humanos».[939]”
― Dorian Lynskey, El ministerio de la verdad (Ensayo)

“For Americans, the decade’s most notorious epidemic was one that never happened. In 1976, President Gerald Ford’s administration became convinced that an outbreak of swine flu at Fort Dix, Maryland, would lead to an epidemic on the scale of 1918 and spent $135 million on vaccines. But the flu didn’t spread, uptake was poor and the government ended up paying out almost $100 million to victims of vaccine-related Guillain-Barré syndrome. In a real epidemic, flu is a greater risk factor than the vaccine but in 1976, the solution was worse than the problem. The fiasco was a major blow to pandemic preparedness.”
― Dorian Lynskey, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World