Quotebank: 1984

1984 Mrs Parsons

'A spanner,' said Mrs Parsons, immediately becoming invertebrate. 'I don't know, I'm sure. Perhaps the children— —' ... the children charged into the living-room.

1984 Eurasian prisoners quotes

'Booing and hissing' ... 'Foreigners, whether from Eurasia or from Eastasia, were a kind of strange animal.' ... '...they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.'

1984 Can't get inside you quote 1

'If they could make me stop loving you—that would be the real betrayal.' ... 'They can make you say anything—ANYTHING—but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you.'

1984 The last man

'If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are ALONE? You are outside history, you are nonexistent.'

1984 Julia broken arm quote

'In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body.'

1984 Can't get inside you quote 2

'They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you.

1984 Winston 'I love you' reaction

'the unreasonable hope persisted, and his heart banged' ... 'as though a fire were burning in his belly' ... 'At the sight of the words I LOVE YOU the desire to stay alive had welled up in him'

1984 Bulletin announcing victory

A shrill trumpet-call had pierced the air. It was the bulletin! Victory! It always meant victory when a trumpet-call preceded the news. A sort of electric drill ran through the cafe.

1984 Sex = rebellion

And what he wanted, more even than to be loved, was to break down that wall of virtue, even if it were only once in his whole life. The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion.

1984 final lines

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

1984 Mirror quotes

He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, grey-coloured, skeleton-like thing was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. ... At a guess he would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease.

1984 Julia sexual violence

He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax. ... He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so, ... round her sweet supple waist, ... odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity. The Hate rose to its climax.

1984 Opening lines

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

1984 The children

It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.

1984 Thickened waist

It was that her waist had grown thicker, and, in a surprising way, had stiffened.

1984 Removal of pleasure

Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act.

1984 Everyone was ugly

Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls.

1984 I betrayed you

She moved her clumsy shoe a few centimetres and deliberately crushed a twig. Her feet seemed to have grown broader, he noticed. 'I betrayed you,' she said baldly. 'I betrayed you,' he said.

1984 Opening lines 2

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. ... It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features.

1984 Two minutes hate

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in.

1984 Things had been different

Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?

1984 Voice of the telescreen opening

a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron