Animal Farm and 1984

by George Orwell

They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had gone thirty meters. They were still arguing, with vivid, passionate faces. 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 there 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.

Winston had nothing to do with the running of the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but 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 nonexistent persons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.

“It is a beautiful thing,” said the other appreciatively. “But there’s not many that’d say so nowadays.” He coughed. “Now, if it so happened that you wanted to buy it, that’d cost you four dollars.

I can remember when a thing like that would have fetched eight pounds, and eight pounds was—well, I can’t work it out, but it was a lot of money.

“There’s no telescreen!” he could not help murmuring. “Ah,” said the old man, “I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow. Now that’s a nice gateleg table in the corner there. Though of course you’d have to put new hinges on it if you wanted to use the flaps.”

“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s!”

Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

pg 98

Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s—

It was the girl from the Fiction Department, the girl with dark hair.

It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you.

pg 102

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.

pg 102

It would not matter if they killed you at once. To be killed was what you expected. But before death (nobody spoke of such things, yet everybody knew of them) there was the routine of confession that had to be gone through: the groveling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth, and bloody clots of hair. Why did you have to endure it, since the end was always the same? Why was it not possible to cut a few days or weeks out of your life? Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess.

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,”

pg 103

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.

pg 105 & 106

it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand.

pg 106

Obviously there must be a message of some kind written on it. For a moment he was tempted to take it into one of the water closets and read it at once. But that would be shocking folly, as he well knew. There was no place where you could be more certain that the telescreens were watched continuously.

pg 106

On it was written, in a large unformed handwriting: I love you.

pg 108

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.

pg 109

Only five nights ago he had contemplated smashing her skull in with a cobblestone; but that was of no importance.

pg 103

There were no telescreens, of course, but there was always the danger of concealed microphones by which your voice might be picked up and recognized; besides, it was not easy to make a journey by yourself without attracting attention.

pg 117

But the truth was that he had no physical sensation except that of mere contact.

pg 120

He was glad that this was happening, but he had no physical desire.

pg 120

It was merely one symptom of her revolt against the Party and all its ways, and somehow it seemed natural and healthy, like the sneeze of a horse that smells bad hay.

pg 122

For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?

pg 124

Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope.

pg 125

“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”

pg 125

No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

pg 126

“When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. 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?”

pg 133

They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police.

pg 133

“Of all horrors in the world—a rat!”

pg 144

Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!’

pg 146

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.

pg 147

Syme had ceased to exist; he had never existed.

pg 147

Winston had dropped his habit of drinking gin at all hours. He seemed to have lost the need for it. He had grown fatter, his varicose ulcer had subsided, leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle, his fits of coughing in the early morning had stopped. The process of life had ceased to be intolerable, he had no longer any impulse to make faces at the telescreen or shout curses at the top of his voice. Now that they had a secure hiding place, almost a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time.

pg 150

So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary.

pg 151

In reality there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no intention of carrying out.

pg 152

Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, “just to keep people frightened.”

pg 153

Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her.

pg 153

She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths.

pg 154

“I’m not interested in the next generation, dear. I’m interested in us.” “You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,” he told her.

pg 156

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane.

pg 156

The conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of it.

pg 159

The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought; the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning.

pg 159

He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.

pg 159

he could not have been less than ten years old, possibly twelve, when it had happened.

For hours at a time she would sit almost immobile on the bed, nursing his young sister, a tiny, ailing, very silent child of two or three, with a face made simian by thinness.

At every meal she would beseech him not to be selfish and to remember that his little sister was sick and also needed food, but it was no use. He would cry out with rage when she stopped ladling, he would try to wrench the saucepan and spoon out of her hands, he would grab bits from his sister’s plate. He knew that he was starving the other two, but he could not help it; he even felt that he had a right to do it.

Then with a sudden swift spring he had snatched the piece of chocolate out of his sister’s hand and was fleeing for the door.

Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying. He turned and fled down the stairs, with the chocolate growing sticky in his hand.

pg 163

The one thing that matters is that we shouldn’t betray one another, although even that can’t make the slightest difference.”

pg 166