He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that “they” will never allow him to do this, that and the other.
The parents sat round watching, and in their crass faces – faces not harsh or evil, only blunted by ignorance and mean virtues – you could see a solemn approval, a solemn pleasure in the spectacle of sin rebuked.
The rat had never come back, but the bugs had multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or clean, the room was paradise.
In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable.
If one has once read Shakespeare with attention, it is not easy to go a day without quoting him, because there are not many subjects of major importance that he does not discuss or at least mention somewhere or another, in his unsystematic but illuminating way.
Now then, Dorothy! No snivelling, please! It all comes right somehow if you trust in God. Matthew vi. 35. The Lord will provide.
In England, where the Press is more centralized and the public more easily deceived than elsewhere, only two versions of the Spanish war have had any publicity to speak of: the Right-wing version of Christian patriots versus Bolsheviks dripping with blood, and the Left-wing version of gentlemanly republicans quelling a military revolt. The central issue has been successfully covered up.
Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
The clerks are French, and, like most French people, are in a bad temper till they have eaten their lunch.
Freedom of speech and of the Press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth bothering about.
Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all.
Don’t think that I did nothing else. It’s only that when you look back over a long period of time, certain things seem to swell up till they overshadow everything else.
But that was merely an intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought to take it. He did not feel it.
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms – one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.
There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking.
The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.
Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody. Naturally this makes one wonder whether after all there was something unreal in his attack upon society.
I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their own sound.
The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people–people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent.