George Orwell — Quotes from Author's Books

He looked round the canteen again.
Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise...

The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.

He had absolutely no clue as to what had happened to her.
There was no enquiry he could make.
She might have been vaporized, she might have committed suicide, she might have been transferred to the other end of Oceania: worst and likeliest of all, she might simply have changed her mind and decided to avoid him.

It was his life, his death, and his resurrection.
It was gin that sank him into stupor every night, and gin that revived him every morning.

From the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.

World-conquest is believed in most firmly by those who know it to be impossible.

When war becomes continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

He was still recognizable, but he was not the same person any longer.

Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside.

At the sight of the words I LOVE YOU the desire to stay alive had welled up in him...

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.

...how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant.

Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing.
Everyone wanted a place where they could be alone occasionally.
And when they had such a place, it was only common courtesy in anyone else who knew of it to keep his knowledge to himself.

If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.