Tom Gray

“When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him.”
― George Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell: Novels, Poetry, Essays:

“The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“acknowledging wholeheartedly, as the enigma that it is, the pointless meaningfulness of living—”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“He had seen how improbable it is that we should come from one another and how improbable it is that we do come from one another. Birth, succession, the generations, history—utterly improbable. He had seen that we don’t come from one another, that it only appears that we come from one another.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral