We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
WILLIAM GOLDINGWe did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
More William Golding Quotes
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Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.
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And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.
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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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How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?
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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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Maybe there is a beast… maybe it’s only us.
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They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.
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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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To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be
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It may be — I hope it is — redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
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He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.
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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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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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Of the authors writing in English, I’d mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I’m afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.
WILLIAM GOLDING