it was only a hopeless fantasy, it passed like an april day, but a look and a word and the dreams they stirred they have stolen my heart away.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.' 'Why not?' 'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.

The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word "Art," and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L'Age d'Or is O.K.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.