while their minds were still clean.'
His voice had grown almost dreamy. The exaltation, the lunatic
enthusiasm, was still in his face. He is not pretending, thought Winston,
he is not a hypocrite, he believes every word he says. What most oppressed
him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched
the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range
of his vision. O'Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself. There
was no idea that he had ever had, or could have, that O'Brien had not long
ago known, examined, and rejected. His mind contained Winston's mind. But
in that case how could it be true that O'Brien was mad? It must be he,
Winston, who was mad. O'Brien halted and looked down at him. His voice had
grown stern again.
'Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however
completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever
spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your
life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for
ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from
which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you
could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be
capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you.
Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living,
or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow.