William Golding Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

William Golding
Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.

William Golding
I will tell you what man is. He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out into the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble. But nature stirs a pudding there...

William Golding
The trouble was, if you were a chief you had to think, you had to be wise.

William Golding
The conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.

William Golding
How can you expect to be rescued if you don't put first things first and act proper?

William Golding
How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?

William Golding
The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.

William Golding
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

William Golding
Maybe, he said hesitantly, maybe there is a beast. The assembly cried out savagely and Ralph stood up in amazement. You, Simon? You believe in this? I don't know, said Simon. His heartbeats were choking him. [...] Ralph shouted. Hear him! He's got the conch! What I mean is... maybe it's only us. Nuts! That was from Piggy, shocked out of decorum.

William Golding
One's intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.

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

William Golding
What could be safer than the bus center with its lamps and wheels?

William Golding
Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!

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

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
The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers but won't tell.

William Golding
The chant was audible but at that distance still wordless. Behind Jack walked the twins, carrying a great stake on their shoulders. The gutted carcass of a pig swung from the stake, swinging heavily as the twins toiled over the uneven ground. The pig's head hung down with gaping neck and seemed to search for something on the ground. At last the words of the chant floated up to them, across the bowl of blackened wood and ashes.
"Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Spill the blood!"
Yet as the words became audible, the procession reached the steepest part of the mountain, and in a minute or two the chant had died away.

William Golding
I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.

William Golding
"Aren't you going to swim?"
Piggy shook his head.
"I can't swim. I wasn't allowed. My asthma—"
"Sucks to your ass-mar!"
Piggy bore this with a kind of humble patience.

William Golding
Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?

William Golding
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
Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.

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
His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, 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.

William Golding
Art is partly communication but only partly. The rest is discovery.

William Golding
Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.

William Golding
"The rules!" shouted Ralph, "you're breaking the rules!"
"Who cares?"
Ralph summoned his wits.
"Because the rules are the only thing we've got!"
But Jack was shouting against him.
"Bollocks to the rules! We're strong — we hunt! If there's a beast, we'll hunt it down! We'll close in and beat and beat and beat — !"

William Golding
It was, perhaps, no situation from which to face a charging badger.

William Golding
Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.

William Golding