Hannah Greendale (Hello, Bookworm)

My fate is to walk amongst ghosts but to never become one myself. My name is Senka, and I am a Ferryer of souls.

My fate is to walk amongst ghosts but to never become one myself. My name is Senka, and I am a Ferryer of souls.

My origin story, as is the case with all denizens of the Underworld, is that I was created when someone was needed to do a job. Charon needed an assistant, and boom, here I was. Though why I sprang up as a scrawny twelve-year-old girl and not some buff, ancient dude like Charon is a bit baffling.

The dark sand glitters menacingly, while thick fog licks between the twisting tree trunks.

This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least twenty-five years in a forced labor camp.

On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with an enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

...four ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided: the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs.

Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago [...] had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.

[Goldstein] was the commander of a vast shadow army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the over throw of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there.

Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.

He was a [...] man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.

...the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

"Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

...the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

The only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party.

The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

Truism are true, hold onto that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall toward the earth's center.