1984 + THT Quote Comparisons

• Topic:Language shaping thought

  • “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words”
  • "bad" = “ungood” and “plusgood” and “doubleplusgood” “In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only 6 words - in reality - only one word” 
  • “narrowing range of thought”

  • "Women are not allowed to read or write, or have any power"
  • "Pen is Envy"
  • “Thought must be rationed.”
• Topic: Female ridicule of male authority

  • Julia: “during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing”

  • (During ceremony:) "The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It's like a fart in church. I feel as always, the urge to laugh, but not because I think its funny"
  • "His tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug's eye" (Commander's penis)
  • Angels' "cocks like three week old carrots" during Prayvaganza
• Topic: Idealisation of the future

  • “Our only true life is in the future” (O’Brien speaking to Winston as member of Brotherhood)
  • “Memorable event in locked loneliness”
  • "We yearned for the future"
  • "I am a refugee of the past"
• Topic: Suspicion, espionage, paranoia

  • Winston’s anxiety around Julia that it was an “amateur spy who was the greatest danger”

  • "The truth is that she is my spy, as I am hers"
• Topic: Make-up as feminine symbol

  • “Her lips were deeply reddened” – Julia becomes a “woman, not a Party comrade”

  • "They wear lipstick, red... that was freedom" (about Japanese tourists (lipstick is a form of female liberation in both)
• Topic: Distortion of Sex and Reproduction

  • “Sex is purely for reproduction.”
  • “work and breed” (Proles) 
  • “our duty to the Party.”

  • "Control women for reproductive and other purposes"
  • "we are for breeding purposes"
  • "I do not say making love"
• Topic: Culture of Fear

  • "’Police patrol, stopping, stopping into people’s windows’
  • ‘Goldstein produced fear and anger automatically"

  • "Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth patrolled"
  • "Guns were for the guards, specially picked from the Angels" "They were objects of fear to us"
• Topic: Reproduction

  • “He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm”
  • “They were all impregnable, as The Party intended that they should be”
  • ”The purpose of marriage was to beget children” 

  • “As if i’m a melon on a stem, this liquid ripeness” 
  • “What you must be, girls, is impenetrable” 
  • “We are for breeding purposes
• Topic: Love, relationships and rebellion

  • “It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act”
  • “At the sight of the words I love you, the desire to live welled up within him”
  • “The more men you’ve had, the more I love you.”

  • “It was like shooting someone” (Offred and Nick’s kiss)
  • “It’s lack of love we die from.”
  • “We are not each other's anymore. Instead, I am his.” (Offred and Luke, after her freedom is taken away)
  • “What the Commander said is true. One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique. Nick for Luke or Luke for Nick. Should does not apply.”
• Topic: Sin as Freedom

  • Winston- ‘'I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones’

  • Offred- ‘So sinful, so free’ (when the commander gives her the dress)
  • ‘Sinfully Scrabbling’
  • “always so stinking pious” (Ofglen to Offred)
• Topic: Distortion of Identity

  • Winston- “A bowed, grey coloured, skeleton-like thing” 

  • Offred- “a distorted shadow, a parody of something” “figure in a red cloak”
• Topic: Perversion of Religion

  • ‘God is power’ O’Brien - the reduction of God’s omnibenevolence and omniscient qualities 
  • ‘We are the priests of power’ O'Brien 

  • ‘God is a National Resource’ banner at the prayvaganza
  • ‘Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the silent’ Aunt Lydia - manipulation of scripture - this is a deviation from the original beatitudes 
  • ‘Bible is kept locked up’ - restriction - enables this manipulation
  • “It is an incendiary device”
• Topic: Destruction of books

  • "The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else."

  • "After the books were transferred they were supposed to go to the shredder, but sometimes I took them home with me."
• Topic: restriction of individuality + identity

  • ‘You were abolished, annihilated: VAPORIZED was the usual word.’
  • ‘Mind of the party which is collective and immortal’
  • ‘Blue overalls’
  • ‘You are the last man’

  • “In a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it”
  • “The Republic of Gilead, said Aunt Lydia, knows no bounds. Gilead is within you.”
  • ‘Wings the colour of blood which defines us’
  • ‘My body is an instrument of pleasure or means of transportation'
• Topic: Memory and the past

  • Mr Charrington’s shop: ‘pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk’ 
  • Mr charrington is an “extinct animal”
  • “In this room I’m going to be a woman” 
  • “The paperweight was the room he was in and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed a sort of eternity at the heart of a crystal” -
  • ‘his eyes fell on the fragments of the glass paperweight’
  • Jezebels: “it's like walking into the past”
  • offred as an ‘evening rental’ - differs to the hotel as ‘rented license’ (pre-gilead)
  • “Why are rabbits supposed to be sexually attractive to men?”
• Topic: Dehumanisation (of the self)

  • “Do it to Julia” willingness to “throw sulphuric acid at a child’s face”
  • ’he kicked the thing into the gutter’ 

  • ”You have to create an it where none was before”
  • ”They force you to kill within yourself”
  • ‘I’ll empty myself, truly, become a chalice’
• Topic: Fruits and Fertility

  • “Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?
  • The prole woman “she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit”
  • “He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls”
  • The prole woman “like an overripe turnip"

  • “There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law.”
  • “Blessed be the fruit”
  • “The pregnant belly is like a huge fruit”
  • [Serena Joy] “snipping off … the swelling genitalia of the flowers… the fruiting body”
  • “Ripeness is all”
  • “This liquid ripeness”
• Topic: Clothing & Costuming

  • “the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party”
  • “The capitalists” and their “top hats”
  • “the odious scarlet sash, aggressive symbol of chastity”

  • ‘He should have a black patch, over one eye, a cravat with horseshoes on it’
  • ‘He goes to the cupboard and gets out a cloak..it’s light blue, the colour for Wives’
  • “I see the two of us, a blue shape, a red shape,... Myself, my obverse.
  • “Everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us.”
• Topic: Forgotten literature and culture  

  • “Winston woke up with the word 'Shakespeare' on his lips.”
  • ‘The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron —they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions’
  • Ampleforth- ‘We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word ”God” to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!’

  • ‘I thought such magazines had all been destroyed’(in reference to the Vogue)
  • ‘Lying on little Japanese mats, a tape playing Les Sylphides’ (flashback to the Centre)
• Topic: Zoomorphism in both texts

  • Goldstein - sheep
  • Proles - run like a rabbit
  • Sime - venomously orthodox -/ snake
  • Winston - rat (Winston “snatching” chocolate out of her dying hand just as a rat will “strip [a child] to the bones”)
  • Aunt Lydia: “naughty puss”
  • Offred: rat in a maze
  • “A cold finger, rubber-clad and jellied, slides into me, I am poked and prodded.”
• Topic: Truth

  • ‘The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’
  • ’I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.’
• Topic: Freedom of proletariats

  • ‘If there is hope’ he had written in the diary, ‘it lies in the proles.’ The words kept coming back to him, a statement of mystical truth and palpable absurdity.’ 

  • ‘The cigarettes must have come from the black market, I though, and that gave me hope’
• Topic: Regime's absolute power

  • ‘Perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true.[...] all you care about is yourself.’ 

  • ‘They can do what they like with me. I am abject. I feel, for the first time, their true power,’ / ‘Tota mulier in utero’ (woman is a womb)