“Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.”

We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.

We’re not savages. We’re English.

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.

Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

But to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.

Whoever dedicates his life to searching out particular connections of nature will spontaneously be confronted with the question how they harmoniously fit into the whole.

The uncertainty relation does not refer to the past; if the velocity of the electron is at first known and the position then exactly measured, the position for times previous to the measurement may be calculated.

We are fit for the work of God only when we have wept over it.

There’s never any real problem fitting guitar and organ together.

I’m sure if the punishment fits the crime, or is more severe.

I liked the idea of all of humanity fitting inside a sugar cube because more than 99.9% of matter is space.