Quotes from book
Coming Up for Air

Name: Coming Up for Air
Author: George Orwell

Coming Up for Air is a novel by George Orwell, first published in June 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II. It combines premonitions of the impending war with images of an idyllic Thames-side Edwardian era childhood. The novel is pessimistic, with its view that speculative builders, commercialism and capitalism are killing the best of rural England, "everything cemented over", and there are great new external threats.

“Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”

George Orwell book Coming Up for Air

Source: Coming Up for Air, Part 3, Ch. 1

“The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past.”

George Orwell book Coming Up for Air

Coming Up for Air, Part I, Ch. 4 (1939)