Quotes from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. ”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“You are a slow learner, Winston."
"How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."
"Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.”
― George Orwell, quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four

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“You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.

After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.

That’s what I believe.

The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.

These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.”
― Robert R. McCammon, quote from Boy's Life

“Choose a book," she said. "Any book. Bring it here, and I'll show you what else the world can offer.”
― Peter V. Brett, quote from The Warded Man

“انكم لا تستطيعون ان تتخيلوا مدة الألم والحنق اللذين يغزوان نفوسكم حين تعبرون عن فكرة عظيمة قدستموها طوال حياتكم، فأذا بأفراد جهلة يجرونها على أرض الشارع وسط أناس لا يقلون عنهم غباء وحماقة، ثم أذا انتم فجأة ترونها في السوق وقد تغيرت سحنتها حتى لا تكاد تعرف، وتمرغت في الوحل وتشوهت وتكسرت، وتغيرت أبعادها وفقدت انسجامها، كلعبة بين ايدي اطفال.....لا! لم يكن الأمر كذلك في عهدنا، ولا الى هذا صبونا. لقد أصبحت أنكر كل شي ولا أعرف شيئا. يجب أن يعود زماننا فيرد الى الطريق القويم كل ما يترنح اليوم ويهتز، والا فما عسى يحدث؟”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Demons

“I’ll not have you bleeding to death on me. That would be just like you, to die and leave me the work of burying you. You have no consideration.”
― Robert Jordan, quote from The Shadow Rising

“If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven't loved enough.”
― Elif Shafak, quote from The Forty Rules of Love

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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