Quotes by William Golding

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!

We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.

Life itself is a rickety building

Heaven lies around us in our infancy.

His manual of heaven and hell lay open before me, and I could perceive my nothingness in this scheme.

I do think that art that doesnt communicate is useless.

Weve got to have rules and obey them. After all, were not savages. Were English, and the English are best at everything.

Now we, if not in the spirit, have been caught up to see our earth, our mother, Gaia Mater, set like a jewel in space. We have no excuse now for supposing her riches inexhaustible nor the area we have to live on limitless because unbounded. We are the children of that great blue white jewel. Through our mother we are part of the solar system and part through that of the whole universe. In the blazing poetry of the fact we are children of the stars.

Philosophy and religion - what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?

This island has no secrets, not from me. It loves me, and I love it, and when I paint my face Im a part of the island. The swarthiness of my face hidden behind the clay and charcoal. I leave behind England, its not important anymore, our island is all that matters. The rhythm of the hunt, the sun, beats deep in my blood. The littluns play, eat, and sleep, there good for nothing and just take up precious space on my island.I couldnt have known a ship would pass at the exact moment my hunters left the fire. We needed the meat. Everything was perfect, the pigs on the mountain, the hunters and our spears, we had to go then. The hunt was perfect, the gouts and gouts of blood, the pigs death screams. But that stupid boat went by, and destroyed my trophy.Then Simon, stupid little Simon, gives the fat belligerent Fatty a piece of meat. He doesnt deserve it, the fat, ass-mar infected, fatty. The know-it-all that says he could do better, he wouldnt hed do the exact same thing in my shoes. Damn him, damn them all! They should have just taken the meat. Then Ralph stands there and tells me Im too malevolent. I even apologized. He doesnt deserve to be chief, hes weak. He wouldnt do it, he wouldnt kill. Theres power behind the spear, impalpable to people like Ralph. We dominate those pigs. Now that we have found the way to kill the pigs, we dont even need to be rescued. It doesnt matter that there was no fire to signal the ship, because we needed the men for the hunt, and I dont regret it anymore because now we have meat.

At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.

It’s like those nights when I was a kid, lying awake thinking the darkness would go on forever. And I couldn’t go back to sleep because of the dream of the whatever it was in the cellar coming out of the corner. I’d lie in the hot, rumpled bed, hot burning hot, trying to shut myself away and know that there were three eternities before the dawn. Everything was the night world, the other world where everything but good could happen, the world of ghosts and robbers and horrors, of things harmless in the daytime coming to life, the wardrobe, the picture in the book, the story, coffins, corpses, vampires, and always squeezing, tormenting darkness, smoke thick. And I’d think of anything because if I didn’t go on thinking I’d remember whatever it was in the cellar down there, and my mind would go walking away from my body and go down three stories defenceless, down the dark stair past the tall, haunted clock, through the whining door, down the terrible steps to where the coffin ends were crushed in the walls of the cellar – and I’d be held helpless on the stone floor, trying to run back, run away, climb up----

He doesnt 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.

-I got the conch! --Piggy (in Lord of the Flies), attempting Democracy

I got this to say. Youre acting like a crowd of kids.

Worse than madness. Sanity.

Theres a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

Weve got to have rules and obey them. After all, were not savages.

The way towards simplicity is through outrage.

I find it very difficult to talk here now because Im watching the sea all the time. The sea always makes me watch it all the time. Ive spent hours and hours not just on the sea but just watching wave after wave come in. If its an image of anything, I think its an image of our own unconscious, the unconscious of our own minds... or you can put it the other way around, and that is that we have a sea in us. After all, we are sea creatures that learnt to walk on the land, are we not? And perhaps one way or another we go back to it. Every night when we dream we go back into that kind of depths, and that kind of beauty and monstrosity and mystery. So really the sea is not a single image, it can really image almost anything that the human mind can discover.