top of page
.png){kind=small}
More
"I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways."
Author Name
Personal Development
"What worried him worst at the moment - for it is often little things that are hardest to stand - was that his lip was bleeding where they had hit him and he couldn't wipe the little trickle of blood away although it tickled him."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I grunted, hauling the rope hand over hand. A plaintive squeak came from the pulley system with each draw, as if I had strapped some unfortunate mouse to a torture device and was twisting with glee."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Every goal has a road block, that is our fear of failure."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We lived in the bowels of New York City. It was a struggle just to survive. This nice suburban kid hadn't had to do much of that before."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you're new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it'll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The whole thing could have been uncomfortable if all your wishes were to be drowned in to the sea or passed through a heart of a lion that shed not the innocent blood."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together."
Author Name
Personal Development
"To some it is Napoleon, to some it is a philosophical struggle, to me it is allegro con brio."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk."
Imagination
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
Truth
"Good writing is like a windowpane."
Writing
"I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan."
Perspective
"And after that, you don't feel the same toward the other person any longer."
Relationship
"The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to the ancient time. Winston woke up with the word 'Shakespeare' on his lips."
Freedom
"It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours."
War
".. the great modern commandment - the eleventh commandment which has wiped out all the others: 'Thou shalt not lose thy job."
Work
"Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children."
Control
"If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate."
Awareness
bottom of page