An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself.
WILLIAM GOLDINGWe’re not savages. We’re English.
More William Golding Quotes
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The Navy’s a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, ‘Frightfully sorry, old chap.’
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I am not a theologian or a philosopher. I am a story teller.
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What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
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I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years; I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.
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While I am on, I can discipline myself to that extent. When I am off, I can’t discipline myself at all. On the other hand, when I am off, there are so many things I like doing, it doesn’t really matter.
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Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.
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If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?
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But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.
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The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
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I do think that art that doesn’t communicate is useless.
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They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.
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Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.
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No human endeavour can ever be wholly good… it must always have a cost.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Which is better–to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.
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Childhood is a disease – a sickness that you grow out of.
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I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.
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Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
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One’s intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.
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We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.
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Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.
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We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.
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We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
WILLIAM GOLDING