1984 Quotes/Themes

Violence:
• Winston has vivid, beautiful hallucinations of being able to ‘flog her [Julia] to death’ and ‘cut
her throat’
• Two Minutes Hate produces a ‘desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-
hammer’
• Violence is associated with even children, ‘I’ll shoot you, I’ll vaporise you’
• Winston’s body is, ‘flung across the cell’ by the guards in the Ministry of Love
• ‘A kick from a guard’s boot had broken the fingers of one of his hands’
• The offer in the cell lets free a ‘frightful blow, with all the weight of his body behind it’
• Winston informs O’Brien he is ‘willing to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face’
• Winston receives a ‘violent kick to the ankle which nearly flung him off balance’
• ‘With that first blow on the elbow the nightmare had started’, referring to start of perpetual
violence in the Ministry of Love
Repression:
• Winston has a contradicting thought about chocolate which is ‘deliberately pushed out of his memory’
• The Party’s undeclared purpose was to ‘remove all pleasure from the sexual act’ and make it ‘furtive and joyless’
• Idea of face crime: It is described as ‘terribly dangerous’ as the smallest thing could give you away – ‘a nervous tick, an unconscious look of
anxiety’, must be repressed
• ‘Eroticism was the enemy’ of the party
• ‘When he [Winston] had gone with that woman it had been his first lapse in two years or thereabouts’, extremities of repressed sexual urges
• ‘The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it’
• Julia speaks about the perpetual nature of repression for girls ‘They rub it into you for years’, referring to chastity and repressing sexual urges
• Alcohol becomes a means able to repress any of Winston’s unwanted thoughts, it is ‘the element he swam in’
• Repression of opposing emotions in the Two Minute Hate, ‘Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary’, success of repression
by all
• Repetition of the word ‘Never’ highlights the extremities of denial
• ‘It was a question of degrading himself’ for the sake of the Party
• ‘Must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of
cyst’
• Winston doubts the party but then ‘pushed the thought down instantly’
Memory:
• Memory hole is referred to as a place where memories can be ‘devoured by the
flames’
• Winston’s memory is ‘not satisfactory under control’
• There is reference to the fact that people could ‘remember the detail of incidents
without being able to recapture their atmosphere’
• ‘There were long black periods to which you could assign nothing’
• Winston tries to ‘squeeze out some childhood memory’
• ‘Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect’
• ‘Uncalled, a memory floated into his mind’
• ‘The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that
any other human being shares my memories’