Quotes About Memory

The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

Who controls the present controls the past. Is it your opinion Winston, that the past has real existence? -O'Brien

Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.

Su memoria [de Winston] fallaba mucho, es decir, no estaba lo suficientemente controlada.

El pasado es únicamente lo que digan los testimonios escritos y la memoria humana.

What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don't exist. Comping up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin that we're in reaches up to the stratosphere.

Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control'

And yet to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history.

Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all

Don't think that I did nothing else. It's only that when you look back over a long period of time, certain things seem to swell up till they overshadow everything else.

it was a stirring tune, something between 'Clementine' and 'La Cucuracha'.

Is it gone for ever? I'm not certain. But I tell you it was a good world to live in. I belong to it. So do you.

The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten

to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.

it was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.

They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you. 'What happens to you here is for ever

Winston stopped writing, partly because he was suffering from cramp. He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish. But the curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the

When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing.

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even

Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.

In un regime la memoria è colpa.

Winston woke up with the word Shakespeare on his lips.