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Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.

This passage from Book Two, Chapter 3 describes Julia’s attitude about the purpose of rebellion against the Party and how it contrasts with Winston’s even though they are united in opposition to the Party. The explanation for this quote in Quotes by Theme: Hopes for Resistance and Revolution (the third quote) suggests that the difference between their attitudes is generational and Julia’s attitude is partly a reflection of how effective the Party has been at stifling dissent.

‘When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour.’

As Julia and Winston continue to discuss sex and rebellion in Book Two, Chapter 3, Julia offers her opinion on why the Party is against recreational sex. The explanation for this quote in Quotes by Character: Julia (the fourth quote) describes how her thoughts on this topic are more profound and informed than Winston’s.

‘In this game that we’re playing, we can’t win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that’s all.’

As his conversation with Julia in Book Two, Chapter 3 continues, Winston’s pessimistic but principled nature emerges again as he says that the Party is bound to win in the end, but that it nevertheless matters how you go about living your life in the meantime. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Character: Winston (the fourth quote).

She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. . . . She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.

In a passage that harkens back to Winston’s sentiment as he wrote into his diary in Book One, Chapter 2 (“He was already dead, he reflected”), the novel adopts Winston’s pessimistic outlook as fact as it reflects on Julia’s continual pushing back against Winston’s gloomy pronouncements about the futility of resistance against the Party. But as the book goes on to explain, Julia isn’t so much denying the fact that resistance is futile as she is just choosing to not focus on that inevitability. Instead, she is a proponent of cleverly living life in the fullest in the meantime as its own reward.

‘I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.’

In this final quote from Winston and Julia’s post-sex debate over how best to live life under the desperate conditions in the novel in Book Two, Chapter 3, Winston alludes to the fact that living under oppression is living only in a meagre sense of that word. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Character: Winston (the fifth quote).

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