William Golding Quotes

I find it very difficult to talk here now because I'm watching the sea all the time. The sea always makes me watch it all the time. I've spent hours and hours not just on the sea but just watching wave after wave come in. If it's an image of anything, I think it's 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.
William Golding
The way towards simplicity is through outrage.
William Golding
We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages.
William Golding
There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.
William Golding
Worse than madness. Sanity.
William Golding
I got this to say. You're acting like a crowd of kids.
William Golding
-I got the conch!" --Piggy (in Lord of the Flies), attempting Democracy
William Golding
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
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----
William Golding
At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
William Golding
This island has no secrets, not from me. It loves me, and I love it, and when I paint my face I'm a part of the island. The swarthiness of my face hidden behind the clay and charcoal. I leave behind England, it's not important anymore, our island is all that matters. The rhythm of the hunt, the sun, beats deep in my blood. The littl'uns play, eat, and sleep, there good for nothing and just take up precious space on my island.I couldn't 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 doesn't deserve it, the fat, ass-mar infected, fatty. The know-it-all that says he could do better, he wouldn't he'd 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 I'm too malevolent. I even apologized. He doesn't deserve to be chief, he's weak. He wouldn't do it, he wouldn't kill. There's 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 don't even need to be rescued. It doesn't matter that there was no fire to signal the ship, because we needed the men for the hunt, and I don't regret it anymore because now we have meat.
William Golding
Philosophy and religion - what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?
William Golding
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.
William Golding
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.
William Golding
I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.
William Golding
His manual of heaven and hell lay open before me, and I could perceive my nothingness in this scheme.
William Golding
Heaven lies around us in our infancy.
William Golding
Life itself is a rickety building
William Golding
We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
William Golding
Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!
William Golding
Perhaps there is a beast...maybe it's only us.
William Golding
The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.
William Golding
Allow me to tell you, Mr Taylor," said I, but quietly as the occasion demanded, "that one gentleman does not rejoice at the misfortune of another in public".
William Golding
Sleep is where we touch what is better left unexamined. There, the whole of life is bundled up, dwindled. There the carefully hoarded and enjoyed personality, our only treasure and at the same time our only defense must die into the ultimate truth of things, the black lightning that splits and destroys all, the positive, unquestionable nothingness.
William Golding
You don't even care enough about us to hate us, do you?
William Golding
As for the fear, you'll have to put up with that like the rest of us.
William Golding
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
-No, not it...I mean...what makes things break up like they do?-Piggy rubbed his glasses slowly and thought. When he understood how Ralph had gone towards accepting him he flushed pinkly with pride.-I donnot, Ralph. I expect it's him.--Jack?--Jack- A taboo was evolving round that word too.
William Golding
I'm against the picture of the artist as a starry-eyed visionary not really in control or knowing what he does. I'd almost prefer the word 'craftsman'. He's like one of those old-fashioned ship builders who conceived the build of the boat in their mind and after that touched every single piece that went into the boat.
William Golding
My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
William Golding
History is the nothing people write about a nothing.
William Golding
What else is there to do?
William Golding
Jack looked around for understanding, but found only respect.
William Golding
The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey the majesty of adult life
William Golding
I've always been puzzled, and am still at this moment in a state of confusion, between the imaginative world and the real world. It is perfectly true to say that I have at some times in my life found that the imaginative world had pushed the real world right out of the way, and was literally more real.
William Golding
It seems to me that we do live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherant, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherant. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like.
William Golding
Ralph chose the firm strip as a path because he needed to think, and only here could he allow his feet to move without having to watch them. Suddenly, pacing by the water, he was overcome with astonishment. 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
... People were never quite what you thought they were.
William Golding
With lack of sleep and too much understanding I grow a little crazy, I think, like all men at sea who live too close to each other and too close thereby to all that is monstrous under the sun and moon.
William Golding
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
I think are foolish to pretend they are equal to men,they are far superior and always have been. -William Golding
William Golding
I'm warning you. I'm going to get waxy. D'you see? You're not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island! So don't try it on, my poor misguided boy, or else---" Simon found he was looking into a vast mouth. There was blackness within, a blackness that spread.
William Golding
Girls say to me, very reasonably, 'why isn't it a bunch of girls? Why did you write this about a bunch of boys?' Well, my reply is I was once a little boy - I have been a brother, a father, I am going to be a grandfather. I have never been a sister, or a mother, or a grandmother. That's one answer. Another answer is of course to say that if you - as it were - scaled down human beings, scaled down society, if you land with a group of little boys, they are more ike a scaled-down version of society than a group of little girls would be. Don't ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say because I'm going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality - this is nothing to do with equality at all. I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been. But one thing you can't do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down, so to speak, into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilisation, of society. The other thing is - why aren't they little boys AND little girls? Well, if they'd been little boys and little girls, we being who we are, sex would have raised its lovely head, and I didn't want this to be about sex. Sex is too trivial a thing to get in with a story like this, which was about the problem of evil and the problem of how people are to live together in a society, not just as lovers or man and wife.
William Golding
Roger edged past the chief, only just avoiding pushing him with his shoulder. The yelling ceased, and Samneric lay looking up in quiet terror. Roger advanced upon them as one wielding a nameless authority.
William Golding
I tell you, money can't build your spire for you. Build it of gold and it would simply sink deeper.
William Golding
Out of the firelight everything was black and silver, black island, rocks and trees carved cleanly out of the sky and silver river with a flashing light rippling back and forth along the lip of the fall.
William Golding
I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
William Golding
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.
William Golding
Lying there in the darkness, he knew he was an outcast. " 'Cos I had some sense.
William Golding
Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
William Golding
Perhaps the various burnings of the Alexandria Library were necessary, like those Australian Forest Fires without which the new seeds cannot burst their shells and make a young, healthy forest.
William Golding
I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.
William Golding
The thing is--fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.
William Golding
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
Life […] is scientific, that’s what it is.
William Golding
Life […] is scientific, that’s what it is.
William Golding
It's simpler to believe in a miracle.
William Golding
It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.
William Golding
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
The greatest ideas are the simplest.
William Golding