Nineteen Eighty Four

I'm surprised that this book wasn't part of my highschool English curriculum.

Should have totally read this earlier, the themes of past/present/future is really my type haha. This is evident in that 4/6 quotations that I collected are all about that:

Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

Nothing exists except an endless present.

Past events, it is argued, to have no objective existence. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.

The 3rd one is like a paraphrase of "You don't remember what happened, what you remember becomes what happened", which I believe is the quotation I left as my grad comment haha.

The other one being:

It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

This is so apparent in the ending of the novel, which surprised me at first, but then again there's no way Winston could have prevailed.

Lastly, this passage about doublethink (which would be amazing to use) really reminds me of Hamlet's "To be or not to be":

To know and not to know,
to be conscious of complete truthfulness
while telling carefully constructed lies,
to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out,
knowing them to be contradictory
and believing in both of them,
to use logic against logic,
to repudiate morality while laying claim to it,
to believe that democracy was impossible
and that the Party was the guardian of democracy,
to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget,
then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed,
and then promptly to forget it again,
and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself –
that was the ultimate subtlety;
consciously to induce unconsciousness,
and then, once again,
to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.

 Well maybe it's similar to just the first part of the soliloquy haha.