William Golding quotes - page 2

Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of. (William Golding)
What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
William Golding
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?
William Golding
What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?
William Golding
If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?
William Golding
The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
William Golding
They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.
William Golding
They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.
William Golding
The rules!" shouted Ralph, "you're breaking the rules!" "Who cares?
William Golding
We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
William Golding
The overall intention may be stated simply enough. Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. .... but after the war I did not because I was unable to. (William Golding)
I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
William Golding
He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.
William Golding
the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.
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
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.
William Golding
I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.
William Golding
The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.
William Golding
At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
William Golding
Worse than madness. Sanity.
William Golding
We're not savages. We're English. (William Golding)
The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.
William Golding
This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.
William Golding
They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten.
William Golding
It seems to me that we do live in two worlds. There is is this physical one, which is coherent, and there is a spiritual one, which to the average man, with his flashes of religious experience, if you like to call them that - that world is very often incoherent. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or... not all the time, occasionally, is a vital one and is what living is like.
William Golding