Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.
WILLIAM GOLDINGSimon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.
More William Golding Quotes
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Which is better–to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?
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He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life,where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one’s waking life was spent watching one’s feet.
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Ralph… would treat the day’s decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.
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Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
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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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Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.
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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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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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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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How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
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Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
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At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
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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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But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.
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It wasn’t until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you’ve got to write your own books and nobody else’s, and then everything followed from there.
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Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
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What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
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He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.
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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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My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
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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.
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However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
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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’re not savages. We’re English.
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Are we savages or what?
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And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.
WILLIAM GOLDING