1984 - Erasure Quotes Flashcards
Only the Thought Police
would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory
Beyond the late ‘fifties everything faded.
When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness
But to trace
out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one
Everything had been different then.
Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England or Britain, though London, he was fairly certain, had always been called London
It was not true, for example,
as was claimed in the Party history textbooks, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes from his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing
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
Withers, however,
was already an unperson. He did not exist : he had never existed
In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible
because there will be now words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten
