The water rose further and dressed Simon’s coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble.
WILLIAM GOLDINGA crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.
More William Golding Quotes
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I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
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.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
We’re all mad, the whole damned race. We’re wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we’re all mad and in solitary confinement.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Only one novel is a novel: that is a successful novel.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
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.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I know there isn’t no beast-not with claws and all that, I mean-but I know there isn’t no fear, either.” Piggy paused. “Unless-” Ralph moved restlessly. “Unless what?” “Unless we get frightened of people.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
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.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The mask was a thing on it’s own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.
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Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
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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I do think that art that doesn’t communicate is useless.
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But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
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.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
Heaven lies around us in our infancy.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I don’t think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we’re concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
The greatest ideas are the simplest.
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Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!
WILLIAM GOLDING -
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 -
Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!
WILLIAM GOLDING -
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.
WILLIAM GOLDING -
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.
WILLIAM GOLDING