Popular quotes in last 24 hours

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-for ever.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Job, chapter fourteen, verse seven," Aunt Al said. " 'For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender shoots will not cease.'

What struck me most was his crooked grin, like he saw the world in his own special way and got a kick out of it.

She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

What I do know is that wondering why you survived don't help you survive.

I'm none too big on giving advice,' Aunt Al said. 'Most times when folks ask for advice, they already know what they should do. They just want to hear it from someone else.

Don't be afraid of your dark places," Mom told her. "If you can shine a light on them, you'll find treasure there.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.

You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean before they came here I could stand it... But now it has changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people...

And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby

It's the basic condition of life to be required to violate our own identity.

You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can...

{T}he most difficult part of the fight is not taking aim at the enemy, but rejecting his definition of you.

There were many such instances, when expressions of sympathy could not be exchanged. What do you say to someone who is telling you about the rape and murder of virgins-I'm sorry, I feel your pain?

Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into us and them.

Whoever we were-and it was not really important what religion we belonged to, whether we wished to wear the veil or not, whether we observed certain religious norms or not-we had become the figment of...

Empathy is Gasby's heart, like many other novels. There is nothing more reproven than being blind in the face of the problems and pains of others.

It has been a week since Ami died and this morning I woke suddenly hours before dawn, indeed the same hour as when my mother died. It was not a dream that woke me, but a thought. And with that thought...

These people," he had said with his inscrutable smile, "are different from us. They don't care about books and such things.

A great novel hears your perceptions, makes you feel the complexity of life and individuals, and defends you from the hypocritical certainty of the validity of your opinions, in morality to watertight...

We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.

Reading a novel is not an exercise in censure.