“It’s like walking into the past.” Commander

“A movie about the past is not the same as the past.” Chapter 37 Offred

“He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been like this” Chapter 1

“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”

“‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”

“Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.

“Within twenty years at most, he reflected, the huge and simple question ‘Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?’ would have ceased once and for all to be answerable.”

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

th the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

“History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.“