orwell

Don__ mock my suggestions, Ridley _ one day in the near future, they might just save your life._ Maxwell D. Kalist.

To Kalist, Baumauer__ just a timber bridge in need of a good hot fire.

You are a more powerful person than you might have ever imagined._ Maxwell D. Kalist.

Are there not times, Ridley, when you yourself wish only to hear the best in people _ and not to be dragged downwards into the underworld we all regularly inhabit?

I__ warning you because you__e young and vulnerable. He__ a dirty, lying, conniving piece of shit and he__ dangerous._ Gottfried Baumauer.

Shame comes in different doses.

Maxwell D. Kalist is a receiving teller at a city bank, Orwell and Finch, where he runs an efficient department of twenty two clerks and twelve junior clerks. He carries a leather-bound vade mecum everywhere with him _ a handbook of the most widely contravened banking rules. He works humourlessly (on the surface of it) in a private, perfectly square office on the third floor of a restored grain exchange midway along the Eastern flank of Kv_tniv__ busy, modern central plaza. Behind his oblong slate desk and black leather swivel chair is an intimidating, three-storey wall made almost entirely of bevelled, glare-reducing grey glass in art-deco style; one hundred and thirty six rectangles of gleam stacked together in a dangerously heavy collage.

Every time I so much as blink you get an erection.

Men circle like bees around honey, buzzing to communicate their sexual despair.

It__ late and most of the clerks are at home in their beds, dreaming of swimming in pools filled with real money.

He__ in a side room alone with her and it__ far too fucking hot.

Without pride, man becomes a parasite _ and there are already too many parasites.

TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE

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.

Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?O'Brien: Of course he exists.Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?O'Brien: You do not exist.

I fear no hell, just as I expect no heaven. Nabokov summed up a nonbeliever__ view of the cosmos, and our place in it, thus: __he cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness._ The 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle put it slightly differently: __ne life. A little gleam of Time between two Eternities._ Though I have many memories to cherish, I value the present, my time on earth, those around me now. I miss those who have departed, and recognize, painful as it is, that I will never be reunited with them. There is the here and now _ no more. But certainly no less. Being an adult means, as Orwell put it, having the __ower of facing unpleasant facts._ True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we__e lucky) to make the most of on this earth.There is also something intrinsically courageous about being an atheist. Atheists confront death without mythology or sugarcoating. That takes courage.

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.