There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
WILLIAM GOLDINGGraham Greene at 82 years old was still writing, and I don’t think anyone can deny the force, the expertise, and the unique quality of his writing, if you take his complete oeuvre.
More William Golding Quotes
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Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.
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The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.
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Together, joined in effort by the burden, they staggered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure.
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The greatest pleasure is not – say – sex or geometry. It is just understanding. And if you can get people to understand their own humanity – well, that’s the job of the writer.
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Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.
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Honestly, I haven’t the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.
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The rules!” shouted Ralph, “you’re breaking the rules!” “Who cares?
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In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.
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Which is better — to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better — to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
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The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.
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This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.
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No human endeavour can ever be wholly good… it must always have a cost.
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
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We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
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A star appeared…and was momentarily eclipsed by some movement.
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At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
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The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.
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My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
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I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
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I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.
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He doesn’t mind if he dies… indeed, he would like to die; but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep; but not at the price of falling to it.
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I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel.
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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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Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It’s as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.
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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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The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers….Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.
WILLIAM GOLDING