Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?
WILLIAM GOLDINGWe’re not savages. We’re English.
More William Golding Quotes
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The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
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Heaven lies around us in our infancy.
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One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.
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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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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.
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There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.
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A star appeared…and was momentarily eclipsed by some movement.
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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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The greatest ideas are the simplest.
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We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
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Even if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper.
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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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We’re not savages. We’re English.
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Are we savages or what?
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He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.
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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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We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
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I’m scared of him,” said Piggy, “and that’s why I know him. If you’re scared of someone you hate him but you can’t stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he’s all right really, an’ then when you see him again; it’s like asthma an’ you can’t breathe.
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There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
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Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
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Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
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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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Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don’t understand.
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I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That’s so many pages longhand.
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The rules!” shouted Ralph, “you’re breaking the rules!” “Who cares?
WILLIAM GOLDING