I remember Oranges; I have tasted Lemons, I think?
it has been so long...
i have been on vacation for 6 weeks which means i have been reading and watching movies for six weeks. i have not left my little town, but instead, opted for a specific laziness prompted by the thick, iowa heat...so no blog mind you.
for now, let me run down some tasty quotes from Orwell's 1984. i am re-reading this because it has been since middle school when i last looked at it. i remember the story, but i have forgotten the amazing prose...and, of course, Orwell is a prophet. I think of Dick Cheney's fat face when i read the line "if there is hope, it lies in the proles."
here are some great lines i have been reading over the past few days:
"I hate purity, I hate goodness. I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones."
"In the old days, [Winston] thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desireable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act."
[Julie]: "Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you the note?"
[Winston] did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love offering to start off by telling the worst.
"I hated the sight of you, he said. "I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone. If you really want to know, I imagined that you had something to do with the Thought Police."
"Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and nonpolitical, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the party was something huge, terrible, and glittering--a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons--a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting--three hundred million people all with the same face."
"In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."
"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
if only Cheney could meet the proles...
i have been on vacation for 6 weeks which means i have been reading and watching movies for six weeks. i have not left my little town, but instead, opted for a specific laziness prompted by the thick, iowa heat...so no blog mind you.
for now, let me run down some tasty quotes from Orwell's 1984. i am re-reading this because it has been since middle school when i last looked at it. i remember the story, but i have forgotten the amazing prose...and, of course, Orwell is a prophet. I think of Dick Cheney's fat face when i read the line "if there is hope, it lies in the proles."
here are some great lines i have been reading over the past few days:
"I hate purity, I hate goodness. I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones."
"In the old days, [Winston] thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desireable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act."
[Julie]: "Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you the note?"
[Winston] did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love offering to start off by telling the worst.
"I hated the sight of you, he said. "I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone. If you really want to know, I imagined that you had something to do with the Thought Police."
"Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve. Great areas of it, even for a Party member, were neutral and nonpolitical, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet, saving a cigarette end. The ideal set up by the party was something huge, terrible, and glittering--a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons--a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting--three hundred million people all with the same face."
"In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."
"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."
if only Cheney could meet the proles...
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