Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [961]

‘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. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.’ — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 961

Note

The anaphoric ‘Never again will you be capable of…’ litany enumerates everything that makes a person a subject, and promises to delete each — the emptying and refilling metaphor makes plain that the state does not merely police behavior but intends to populate the evacuated self entirely with itself.