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In this place, he knew instinctively, the lights would never be turned out. It was the place with no darkness: he saw now why O’Brien had seemed to recognize the allusion.

In Book Three, Scene 1, Winston finds himself in a prison cell—where the lights are never turned off, and he realizes it was his fate to end up there all along. Read more about this quote in Quotes by Symbol: The Place Where There Is No Darkness (the fifth quote).

‘We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word 'God' to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it! . . . The rhyme was 'rod.' Do you realize there are only twelve rhymes to ‘rod’ in the entire language?’

This is a quote from Winston’s coworker (and now fellow prisoner), Ampleforth explaining to Winston how he ended up in prison. While 1984 is a very serious book in message as well as in tone, Orwell’s sharp and sardonic wit comes through in places, including this encounter—a play on the well-known comedic trope of “What are you in for?” Typically, one prisoner will say he committed a horrible crime like quadruple homicide while the other replies that he did something trivial like wearing white after Labor Day. The version of that joke that Orwell delivers here is that Winston has committed high treason while Ampleforth’s crime is that he couldn’t come up with a suitable rhyme for “rod.”  Orwell is not using humor here to get a laugh. Rather he is employing absurdity to help make his point about the perils of totalitarianism.

In a sense, however, Ampleforth is guilty of something far more sinister than the crime for which he has been jailed, and Winston is as well. Both men have worked at the Ministry of Truth perverting their talents and ignoring their intellectual beliefs in the service of the corrupt state. It seems plausible that Orwell used the story of Ampleforth as a warning to intellectuals about the danger of collaborating with evil governments.

‘They got me a long time ago.’

This is O’Brien’s best-known quote in 1984, and it comes in Book Three, Chapter 2 when he enters Winston’s cell—not as a fellow prisoner, but as his captor. The meaning of O’Brien’s words here are subject to debate, as is discussed in Quotes by Character: O’Brien (the second quote).

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