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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.
 

After his attempt to learn about the pre-Revolutionary past by talking to an elderly man fails, Winston comments—with elements of both horror and awe—about how successful the Party’s efforts to completely change perceptions about the past will be. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Theme: Control of Information and History (the third quote).

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 this important quote from Book One, Chapter 8, Winston makes the crucial connection between how current behavior is indelibly impacted by our understanding of the past. Read more about this quote in Famous Quotes Explained (the fourth quote).

What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one.

This passage from Book One, Chapter 8 describes the 100-year-old glass paperweight that Winston buys and finds so alluring as well as its symbolic significance in the novel. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Symbol: The Glass Paperweight & St. Clement’s Church (the first quote).

What appealed to him about it was not so much its beauty as the air it seemed to possess of belonging to an age quite different from the present one.

The explanation to this quote in Quotes by Theme: Control of Information and History (the fourth quote), which is also about the glass paperweight that Winston buys in Book One, Chapter 8, discusses how the Party’s banning of items from the past is yet another way that it controls its citizens.

Winston wondered vaguely to what century the church belonged. It was always difficult to determine the age of a London building. Anything large and impressive, if it was reasonably new in appearance, was automatically claimed as having been built since the Revolution, while anything that was obviously of earlier date was ascribed to some dim period called the Middle Ages. The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of any value. One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books.

This quote and the next one are about another connection to the forbidden past that Winston latches onto in Book One, Chapter 8: the building that was St. Clement’s Church in London before the Revolution. As the explanation to this quote in Quotes by Symbol: The Glass Paperweight & St. Clement’s Church (the second quote) discusses, the Party’s control of the past extends to manipulation of architectural history.

Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s! It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten. From one ghostly steeple after another he seemed to hear them pealing forth. Yet so far as he could remember he had never in real life heard church bells ringing.

When Mr. Charrington mentions a children’s rhyme from the distant past about the church bells of pre-Revolutionary London in Book One, Chapter 8, Winston’s imagination is seized by false memories of hearing the bells chime, which is an indication of how much he is preoccupied by learning more about the past. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Symbol: The Glass Paperweight & St. Clement’s Church (the third quote).

The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one would never see, but which, by foreknowledge, one could mystically share in.

In this last quote from Book One, at the end of Chapter 8, Winston’s thoughts again return to his peculiar (and unsubstantiated) dream about O’Brien being a potential ally in the struggle against the Party. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Symbol: The Place Where There Is No Darkness (the third quote).

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