“Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant…”

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

“For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.”

“I learned that what happened to me did not have to define who I was. My past could not control my future unless I allowed it to.”

“Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.”

“Events in the past maybe roughly divided into those which and probably never happened and those which do not matter.”