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Books Quotes by George Orwell

67 Books quotes by George Orwell

All Books quotes George Orwell’s page

Orwell’s sharp eye on the world shines through his 67 remarks on books, where he tackles everything from the danger of banned ideas to the quiet comfort of a good read. The collection captures his blend of political urgency and personal reverence for the printed page.

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Writing a novel is agony.

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The cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books.

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“He was alone with seven thousand books...mostly aged and unsaleable.”

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Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.

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Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money, only money.

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Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

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Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.

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

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Good novel are written by people who are not frightened.

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The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a…

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“If one faces facts one must admit that nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad”

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In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people…

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Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of…

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“Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else—that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to…

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The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical…

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“The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions,”

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“I do hope you'll forgive me if I overwhelm you with talk. When I meet somebody who's heard that books exist, I'm…

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“From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I…

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“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been…

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The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a…

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And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading…

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It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning…

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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…

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“The real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in…

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“She spent an astonishing amount of time in attending lectures and demonstrations, distributing literature for the Junior Anti-Sex League, preparing banners for…

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“The history books say that life before the Revolution was completely different from what it is now. There was the most terrible…

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“He got up. It was too early to go to bed; at least, he was not in the mood for it. He…

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“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book…

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“Reading Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge's brilliant and depressing book, "The Thirties", I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a…

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“There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers…

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“Julia had once been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for…

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“Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the…

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The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set…

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Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

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The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

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“This idea that the buying, or even the reading, of books is an expensive hobby and beyond the reach of the average…

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“But, he realised, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the…

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If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would…

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“It was very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960. The”

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“When a novel lacks the indefinable, unmistakable thing we call beauty, one looks in it for sound delineation of character, or humour…

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More by George Orwell

In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel.:; Up to 1914 you did…

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It was given out that the animals there practised cannibalism, tortured one another with red-hot horseshoes, and had their females in common. This was…

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“The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running…

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He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the…

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“if you took 1 Corinthians, chapter thirteen, and in every verse wrote 'money' instead of 'charity', the chapter had ten times as much meaning…

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Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

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And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became…

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“Whitman himself "accepted" a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through…

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“But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Whatever the Party holds to…

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“And the people under the sky were also very much the same...everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just…

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Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally…

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Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.

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“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to…

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And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at…

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“Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution.…

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