“If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?”

Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That’s what you could say about it.

How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?

At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.

I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.

The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers….Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.

What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.

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.

Heaven lies around us in our infancy.

There’s a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

You’ll get back to where you came from.

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

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.’

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.

Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.

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.

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.

In every forest, on every farm, in every orchard on earth, it’s what’s under the ground that creates what’s above the ground. That’s why placing your attention on the fruits that you have already grown is futile.

God has privileged us in Christ Jesus to live above the ordinary human plane of life. Those who want to be ordinary and live on a lower plane can do so, but as for me, I will not.

We may treat of the Soul as in the body – whether it be set above it or actually within it – since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate.Now from this relation.

As in certain combinations so words and in all kinds of music; for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it.

The day you stop doing the small things is the day you think you’re above everybody else.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.