Quotes from William Golding

We think we know . Know? That's worse than an atom bomb, and always was.

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

Che idea, pensare che la Bestia fosse qualcosa che si potesse cacciare e uccidere! [...] Lo sapevi, no?… Che io sono una parte di te? Vieni vicino, vicino, vicino! che io sono la ragione per cui non c'è niente da fare? Per cui le cose vanno come vanno?

Las ideas más brillantes son siempre las más sencillas.

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.

I spit upon your God!

Allow me to tell you, Mr Taylor, said I, but quietly as the occassion demanded, that one gentleman does not rejoice at the misfortune of another in public.

You don't even care enough about us to hate us, do you?

I recognised uneasily the hand of what I sometimes thought to be my personal nemesis, the spirit of farce.

The whole book is posing a question. You think you've won a war - what you've done is finish a war. There was a crime committed in that war the like of which perhaps was never committed in human history. You think about it.

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.

But for all the feet that had trodden it, it remained ordinary dust, which seemed to make everything much sadder.

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.

We don't know much about our current selves, do we?

For if humanity has a future on this planet of a hundred million years, it is unthinkable that it should spend those aeons in a ferment of national self-satisfaction and chauvinistic idiocies.

Friends will hand over anything that is needed and think nothing of it!

Nem nagyon segítenek az emberek! Azt akarta mondani, hogy az emberek sohasem pontosan olyanok, mint amilyennek elképzeljük Å'ket.

Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling; and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved further along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon's dead body moved out towards the open sea.

History is the nothing people write about a nothing.

could a face have been fashioned to fit the attitude of his consciousness where it lay suspended between life and death that face would have worn a snarl.

They understood only too well the liberation into savagery that the concealing paint brought.

El miedo no puede hacer más daño que un sueño.

I had never met the Roman Catholuc Church outside of a history book. To come across it living, so to speak, was like finding a diplodocus.

I dunno, Ralph. We just got to go on, that's all. That's what grown-ups would do.