Kelly’s Reviews > Nineteen Eighty-Four > Status Update

“Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearthstone.” p254

“Has it ever occurred to you” he said, “that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?” p265

“…reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” p285

“…made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity…and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.” p180

“What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles..had remained in this condition.” p191

“I’m good at spotting people who don’t belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them.” p140

“No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.” p145

“…that sexual privation induced hysteria, desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.” p153


“Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing.” p159

“Your worst enemy, he reflected was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.” p73

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” p81

“…helplessness took hold of Winston. The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish heap of details.” p105

“Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.” p35

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened - that surely, was more terrifying than mere torture or death?” p40

“Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” p61

“…set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen.” p7

“…some eavesdropping little sneak - ‘child hero’ was the phrase generally used - had overheard some compromising remark and denounced his parents to the Thought Police.” p29

“It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.” p32