Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering the truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage."

Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason."

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten."

The past not only changed, but changed continuously."

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY."

"It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an armchair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock."

"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."

"He stopped thinking and merely felt."

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

"She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life, she did not understand to push an inconvenient person off a cliff solves nothing."

"Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all."

"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."

"He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simple because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love."

"Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make stop loving you -- that would be the real betrayal."

"She thought it over. 'They can't do that,' she said finally. 'It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything -- ANYTHING -- but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you.'"

"We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand of years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little."

"The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already."