Part I: Chapter 1

  • “It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.”
  • “The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely”
  • “…there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere.”
  • “The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.”
  • “The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.”
  • “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”
  • “The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs.”
  • “This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.”
  • “he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought”
  • “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.”
  • “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER”

Chapter 2

  • “It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.”
  • “Years ago… he had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.’… It was O’Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark.”
  • “The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.”
  • “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”
  • “How could you make an appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?”
  • To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink- greetings!… Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.”
  • “Now that he had recognised himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.”

Chapter 3

  • “Perhaps it was the time when the atomic bomb had fallen on Colchester. He did not remember the raid itself, but he did remember his father’s hand clutching his own as they hurried down, down, down into some place deep in the earth, round and round a spiral staircase which rang under his feet and which finally so wearied his legs that he began whimpering and they had to stop and rest.”
  • “Even to understand the world ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

Chapter 4

  • “The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify.”
    • alter= change in character or composition, typically in a comparatively small but significant way
    • rectify= put right; correct
      • Winston’s job in the novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is to change sections of old documents in order for it to appear that the government had indeed predicted of the future correctly and to allow no other record to prove otherwise. In this way, the government is able to control what is deemed true. Winston describes his job as altering the articles or news-items, the definition of alter being: “to change in character or composition, typically in a comparatively small but significant way” which is exactly what Winston perceives himself to be doing. He understands that what he is doing is not portraying the truth to the people who live under this government and because of this, we as the reader are able to grasp a better understanding of how the people have been manipulated and brainwashed, because Winston is not. The official phrase names this process as rectifying, the definition being: “to put right; correct”. By filtering and refining the dictionary, the Party is able to replace words they believe are wrong or could limit the amount of control they have over the minds of the people. Therefore, by using the word rectify when referring to lying about the past, they can portray their actions as being necessary and the right thing to do.

Chapter 5

  • “We’re destroying words- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.”
  • “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it…. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”
  • “‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly.”
  • “Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
  • “One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.”
  • “Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.”
  • “How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal”

Chapter 6

  • “They were a few metres apart when the left side of the man’s face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm…. obviously habitual. He remembered thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for. And what was frightening was that the action was quite possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see.”
  • “Tacitly the Party was inclined to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed. Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless, and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class.”
  • “The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it.”
  • “Desire was thoughtcrime.”

Chapter 7

  • If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
  • “The Party could not be overthrow from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another.”
  • “Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflection of the voice; at the most, an occasional whispered word.”
  • “Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?”
  • Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
  • “But simultaneously, true to the principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules… Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina.”
  • “And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.”
  • “As the Party slogan put it: ‘Proles and animals are free.'”
  • “Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.”
  • “He picked up the children’s history book and looked at the portrait of Big Brother which formed its frontispiece. The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you- something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable- what then?”
  • “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
  • Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Chapter 8

  • “In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed… There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.”
  • “He was walking up a cobbled street of little two-storey houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of rat-holes.”
  • “The women studied him in hostile silence as he went past. But it was not hostility, exactly; merely a kind of wariness, a momentary stiffening, as at the passing of some unfamiliar animal.”
  • “Suddenly the whole street was in commotion. There were yells of warning from all sides. People were shooting into the doorways like rabbits.”
  • “The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that their were some millions of proles for whom the lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory… he was aware (indeed everyone in the Party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons.”
  • “A very old man, bent but active, with white moustaches that bristled forward like those of a prawn, pushed open the swing door and went in.”
  • “The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the great purges of the ‘fifties and ‘sixties, and the few who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender.”
  • ” ‘Lackeys!’, ‘e says, ‘Lackeys of the bourgeoisie! Flunkies of the ruling class!’ Parasites- that was another of them. And ‘yenas- ‘e def’nitely called ’em ‘yenas. Of course ‘e was referring to the Labour Party, you understand.’ “
  • “They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones. And when memory failed and written records were falsified- when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.”
  • “Whether she was really an agent of the Thought Police, or simply an amateur spy actuated by officiousness, hardly mattered. It was enough that she was watching him.”
  • “He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.”
  • “One is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body.”
  • “the body swells up until it fills the universe… life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.”
  • ” ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,’ O’Brien had said to him. He knew what it meant, or he thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in.”

Part II: Chapter 1

  • “A curious emotion stirred in Winston’s heart. In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.”
  • “the girl had slipped something into his hand. There was no question that she had done it intentionally.”
  • At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him, and the taking of minor risks suddenly seemed stupid.”
  • “The person immediately ahead of him in the queue was a small, swiftly-moving, beetle-like man with a flat face and tiny, suspicious eyes.”
  • “It was impossible that this affair should end successfully; such things did not happen in real life.”
  • “Ampleforth, the hairy-eared poet, wandering limply round the room with a tray”

Chapter 2

  • “That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.”
  • “Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

Chapter 3

  • “What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship…’If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’ “
  • “She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.”

Chapter 4

  • “It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing about.”
  • “He had never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was startling.”
  • “He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of the summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary?”
  • “The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.”

Chapter 5

  • “Syme had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before- nothing had been crossed out- but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.”
  • “The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Hate Week (the Hate Song, it was called) had already been composed and was being endlessly plugged on the telescreens. It had a savage, barking rhythm which could not exactly be called music, but resembled the beating of a drum. Roared out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying.”
  • “He was in his native element and as happy as a lark.”
  • “The room was a world. A pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.”
  • “Mr Charrington, thought Winston, was another extinct animal.”
  • “To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.”
  • “She had grown up since the Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological battles of the ‘fifties and ‘sixties. Such a thing as an independent political movement was outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible.”
  • “Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her.”
  • “History has stopped.”
  • “They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”

Chapter 7

  • “He knew he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had the right to do it.”

Quotes referencing animals:

Page 246, 249, 252, 284, 322 (duckspeak),

  • “Opposite Winston there sat a man with a chinless, toothy face exactly like that of some large, harmless rodent. His fat, mottled cheeks were so pouched at the bottom that it was difficult not to believe that he had little stores of food tucked away there. His pale-grey eyes flitted timorously from face to face, and turned quickly away again when he caught anyone’s eye.”
  • “He had set up a wordless howling, like an animal.”
  • “There were times when he rolled about the floor, as shameless as an animal, writhing his body this way and that in an endless, hopeless effort to dodge the kicks, and simply inviting more and yet more kicks, in his ribs, in his belly, on his elbows, on his shins, in his groin, in his testicles, on the bone at the base of his spine.”
  • “He moved closer to the glass. The creature’s face seemed to be protruded, because of it’s bent carriage… Certainly it was his own face,”
  • “The aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ‘to quack like a duck’… duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise.”

The headless women of hollywood

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