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“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. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”
—1984 [1949] George Orwell
“It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.”
—The Catcher in the Rye [1951] J.D. Salinger
“The sun burnt every day. It burnt Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burnt things with the firemen and the sun burnt Time, that meant that everything burnt!”
—Fahrenheit 451 [1953] Ray Bradbury
“Before I knowed it, I was sayin’ out loud, ‘The hell with it! There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing.’”
—The Grapes of Wrath [1939] John Steinbeck
“Ravished! How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions.”
—Lady Chatterley’s Lover [1928] D. H. Lawrence
“The Planet drifts to random insect doom . . .”
—Naked Lunch [1959] William S. Burroughs
“All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I’ve changed all the names.”
—Slaughterhouse-Five [1969] Kurt Vonnegut
“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
—To Kill a Mockingbird [1960] Harper Lee
“I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.”
—Tropic of Cancer [1934] Henry Miller
“History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
—Ulysses [1922] James Joyce
Suggested Reading:
Henry Miller: Dirty Old Man of American Letters
“Signaling Through the Flames . . .” A Compendium of Classic Cult Fiction Quotes
“Sylvia Plath Stuck Her Head in an Oven . . .” & Other Disturbing Deaths in the Literary World
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