"Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order."
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Quote collection
George Orwell quotes (page 36 of 39)
767 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape."
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"I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production."
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"A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him."
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"Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners."
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"the mute protest in your own bones"
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"The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them."
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"Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?"
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"On a ruinous wall I came upon a poster dating from the previous year and announcing that ‘six handsome bulls’ would be killed in the arena on such and such a date. How forlorn its faded colours looked. Where were the handsome bulls and the handsome bull-fighters now? It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays - for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists."
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"I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing."
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"Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."
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"And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?"
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"I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool."
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"Writing a novel is agony."
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"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks."
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"It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx."
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"How right the working classes are in their "materialism." How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!"
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"The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment."
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"The end was contained in the beginning."
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"...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures."
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