More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one’s own body.
even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.
the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.
He almost ignored Julia, seeming to take it for granted that Winston could speak for her.
There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.
Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.
As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful marelike buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the
body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful.
“She’s beautiful,” he murmured. “She’s a metre across the hips, easily,” said Julia. “That is her style of beauty,” said Winston.
It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody,
“You are the dead,” said an iron voice behind them. They sprang apart. Winston’s entrails seemed to have turned into ice. He could see the white all round the irises of Julia’s eyes. Her face had turned a milky yellow. The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply, almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath. “You are the dead,” repeated the iron voice. “It was behind the picture,” breathed Julia.
You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.
He was not bored; he had no desire for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or
questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying.
