Anca

“He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking. . . . Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Stars, on the other hand, were inexplicable. Not holes in the sky, not candles, not electric lights, not anything that resembled what you knew. The immensity of the black air overhead, the vastness of the space that stood between you and those small luminosities, was something that resisted all understanding. Benign and beautiful presences hovering in the night, there because they were there and for no other reason. The work of God's hands, yes, but what in the world had he been thinking?”
― Paul Auster, Report from the Interior

“Your earliest thoughts, remnants of how you lived inside yourself as a small boy, You can remember only some of it, isolated bits and pieces, brief flashes of recognition that surge up in you unexpectedly at random moments - brought on by the smell of something, or the touch of something, or the way the light falls on something in the here and now of adulthood.
At least you think you can remember, you believe you remember, but perhaps you are not remembering at all, or remembering only a later remembrance of what you think you thought in that distant time which is all but lost to you now.”
― Paul Auster , Report from the Interior

“Until you were five or six, perhaps even seven, you thought the words human being were pronounced human bean. You found it mystifying that humanity should be represented by such a small, common vegetable, but somehow, twisting around your thoughts to accommodate this misunderstanding, you decided that the very smallness of the bean was what made it significant, that we all start out in our mother's womb no larger than a bean, and therefore the bean was the truest, most powerful symbol of life itself.”
― Paul Auster, Report from the Interior