They fear love because it creates a world they can’t control.
It’s queer what an inch or two of fat can do.
Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards.
It had driven into her a far deeper understanding than she had had before of the great modern commandment – the eleventh commandment which has wiped out all the others: “Thou shalt not lose thy job.
Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.
What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.
Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.
Ennui clogged our souls like cold mutton fat. Our bones ached because of it. The clock’s hands stood at four, and supper was not till six, and there was nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.
Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations – that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger, healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved.
All men are enemies.
Very early in her married life he had decided – though perhaps it was only that he knew her more intimately than he knew most people – that she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. ‘The human sound-track’ he nicknamed her in his own mind.
The war had jerked me out of the old life I’d known, but in the queer period that came afterwards I forgot it almost completely.
It’s queer, the power of these rich men.
By a kind of instinct – rather queer, and probably indicating another landmark in my life – I just quietly put the money in the bank and said nothing to anybody.
It’s a rotten thing to have a soapy neck. It gives you a disgusting sticky feeling, and the queer thing is that, however carefully you sponge it away, when you’ve once discovered that your neck is soapy you feel sticky for the rest of the day.
It would be a queer sort of god. Among other things it would be bisexual. The top half would be a managing director and the bottom half would be a wife in the family way.
I could see that because I’d seen her cursed she hated me like the devil. Queer!
It was queer to think that less than three minutes earlier I’d been in the devil of a stew, with actual cold sweat on my backbone, at the thought that she might be dead.
And it was a queer thing I’d done coming here.
There was something vaguely queer about his appearance.