Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.
Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse – hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.
If one harbors anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissable.
Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.
Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.
Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.
So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
To die hating them, that was freedom.
I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards.
How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?
Some hams hanging in the kitchen were taken out for burial.
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.
Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.
We may be together for another six months – a year – there’s no knowing. At the end we’re certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be?
Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.
It was not the man’s brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.