Top 100 Quotes About William Golding
#1. I think are foolish to pretend they are equal to men,they are far superior and always have been. -William Golding
William Golding
#2. Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.'
Philip Zimbardo
#3. I really feel the novel has certain conveniences about it and has something so fundamental about it you could almost say that as long as there is paper, there is going to be the novel.
William Golding
#4. The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.
William Golding
#5. Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.
William Golding
#6. We think we know."
"Know? That's worse than an atom bomb, and always was.
William Golding
#7. It was, perhaps, no situation from which to face a charging badger.
William Golding
#9. There is nothing in it of course. Just a feeling. But you can feel as if you're not hunting, but - being hunted, as if something's behind you all the time in the jungle.
William Golding
#10. I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.
William Golding
#12. Jack looked around for understanding, but found only respect.
William Golding
#13. The thing is
fear can't hold you any more than a dream ...
William Golding
#14. In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.
William Golding
#15. I was the only boy in our school what had asthma," said the fat boy with a touch of pride. "And I've been wearing specs since I was three.
William Golding
#16. He wanted to explain how people were never quite what you thought they were.
William Golding
#17. For a small island, the place is remarkably diverse. Writers tend to see things from their own points of view, looking in one direction very much.
William Golding
#19. There isn't anyone to help you. Only me. And I'm the beast.
William Golding
#22. Other people could stand up and speak to an assembly, apparently, without that dreadful feeling of pressure of personality; could say what they would as though they were speaking to only one person
William Golding
#23. However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.
William Golding
#25. I cannot convince myself that my mental capacities are important enough to justify either the good or the harm they started.
William Golding
#26. Even if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper.
William Golding
#27. If faces were different when lit from above or below
what was a face? What was anything?
William Golding
#29. Yet I was wound up. I tick. I exist. I am poised eighteen inches over the black rivets you are reading, I am in your place, I am shut in a bone box and trying to fasten myself on the white paper. The rivets join us together and yet for all the passion we share nothing but our sense of division.
William Golding
#30. I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
William Golding
#31. Lok was running as fast as he could. His head was down and he carried his thorn bush horizontally for balance and smacked the drifts of vivid buds aside with his free hand.
William Golding
#32. His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.
William Golding
#33. 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
#34. Childhood is a disease - a sickness that you grow out of.
William Golding
#35. Who would sharpen a point aginst the darkness of the world?
William Golding
#38. Piggy was a bore; his fat, his ass-mar and his matter-of-fact ideas were dull,
William Golding
#39. Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
William Golding
#40. What they might become in darkness nobody cared to think.
William Golding
#41. The conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.
William Golding
#42. He was so delighted he stood on his head. And this is one of the ways small boys show they're delighted, they stand on their head and waggle their feet in the air.
William Golding
#43. Piggy took off his shoes and socks, ranged them carefully on the ledge and tested the water with one toe. 'It's hot!' 'What did you expect?' 'I didn't expect nothing. My auntie-' 'Sucks to your auntie!
William Golding
#44. The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey the majesty of adult life
William Golding
#46. 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
#47. -I got the conch!" --Piggy (in Lord of the Flies), attempting Democracy
William Golding
#48. Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.
William Golding
#51. He walked slowly into the middle of the clearing and looked steadily at the skull that gleamed as white as ever the conch had done and seemed to jeer at him cynically An inquisitive ant was busy in one of the eye sockets but otherwise the thing was lifeless. Or was it?
William Golding
#52. 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
#53. I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel.
William Golding
#55. The sting of ashes in his eyes, tiredness, fear, enraged him.
William Golding
#56. The crying went on, breath after breath, and seemed to sustain him upright as if he were nailed to it.
William Golding
#57. His manual of heaven and hell lay open before me, and I could perceive my nothingness in this scheme.
William Golding
#58. Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.
William Golding
#60. This was a savage whose image refused to blend with that ancient picture of a boy in shorts and a shirt.
William Golding
#61. I'm frightend. Of us. I want to go home. O God I to go home." "It's was an accident," said Piggy stubbornly,"and that's that." He touched Ralph's bare shoulder and Ralph shuddered at the human contact.
William Golding
#62. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
William Golding
#63. I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
William Golding
#64. They knew very well why he hadn't: because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood
William Golding
#65. 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
#66. What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
William Golding
#67. I don't like the word 'allegorical', I don't like the word 'symbolic' - the word I really like is 'mythic', and people always think that means 'full of lies', whereas of course what it really means is 'full of truth which cannot be told in any other way but a story'.
William Golding
#68. Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she'll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she'll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she'll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she'll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her.
William Golding
#69. 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.
William Golding
#72. The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers ... Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.
William Golding
#73. I came to see you two- Words could not express the dull pain of these things.
William Golding
#74. My father was very musical, and music plays quite a large part in my life.
William Golding
#75. The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.
William Golding
#76. Was it a good --" The air was heavy with unspoken knowledge. Sam twisted and the obscene word shot out of him. "-- dance?"
Memory of the dance that none of them bad attended shook all four boys convulsively.
"We left early.
William Golding
#77. The sun in the west was a drop of burning gold that slid nearer and nearer the sill of the world.
William Golding
#78. The best novels, the writer's imagination becomes the reader's reality.
William Golding
#79. The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
William Golding
#80. A single drop of water that had escaped Piggy's fingers now flashed on the delicate curve like a star.
William Golding
#81. The journey of life is like a man riding a bicycle. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. We know that if he stops moving and does not get off he will fall off.
William Golding
#83. The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.
William Golding
#84. We need an assembly, not for cleverness, but for setting things straight.
William Golding
#87. Bit by bit [the Second World War] really changed my view of what people were capable of, and therefore what human nature was.
William Golding
#88. You're a beast and a swine and a bloody, bloody thief!
William Golding
#89. And dying is more natural than living, because what could be more unnatural than that panicstricken thing leaping and falling like a last flame beneath the ribs?
William Golding
#90. The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers but won't tell.
William Golding
#91. So the last part, the bit we can all talk about, is kind of deciding on the fear.
We've got to talk about this fear and decide there's nothing in it.
William Golding
#92. 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
#93. 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.'
William Golding
#94. But nobody else understands about the fire. If someone threw you a rope when you were drowning. If a doctor said take this because if you don't take you'll die - you would, wouldn't you?
William Golding
#96. Maybe," he said hesitantly, "maybe there is a beast." [ ... ] "What I mean is, maybe it's only us.
William Golding
#97. If you don't change your hairstyle because it's mostly fallen out and you don't shave, you've no cause to go chasing yourself in a mirror.
William Golding
#98. 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.
William Golding
#99. My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
William Golding
#100. 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.
William Golding
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