We’re not savages. We’re English.
WILLIAM GOLDINGThe world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
More William Golding Quotes
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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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Are we savages or what?
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He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.
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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.
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A 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.
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There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.
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I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.
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Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?
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While I am on, I can discipline myself to that extent. When I am off, I can’t discipline myself at all. On the other hand, when I am off, there are so many things I like doing, it doesn’t really matter.
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The thing is – fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.
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We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
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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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Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
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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.
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Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don’t understand.
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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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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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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.
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Graham Greene at 82 years old was still writing, and I don’t think anyone can deny the force, the expertise, and the unique quality of his writing, if you take his complete oeuvre.
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As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn’t seen him on their box, buy the paperback.
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I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.
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Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!
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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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If I blow the conch and they don’t come back; then we’ve had it. We shan’t keep the fire going. We’ll be like animals. We’ll never be rescued.” “If you don’t blow, we’ll soon be animals anyway.
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Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
WILLIAM GOLDING -
But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.
WILLIAM GOLDING