Albertix’s Reviews > 1984 > Status Update

“What happens to you here is for ever. Understand that in advance. (…) Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

“He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? (…) Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to.”

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

“His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.”