Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

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.

The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.