William Golding Quotes

Joe Keohane, “Politically Correct ‘Lord of the Flies,’” The New Yorker, September 9, 2015 This humorous essay recasts many of the novel’s most emblematic moments in a mashup of politically correct sensibilities. Here debates aren’t about who should be chief; instead they’re about the need to eschew noninclusive language, create a safe space, and recognize the blind spots that accompany positions of privilege. A great example of how satire asks us to poke fun at ourselves, and a text that adds welcome levity to discussions of an otherwise dark novel.

We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?

They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned. At last Simon gave up and looked back; saw the white teeth and dim eyes, the blood — and his gaze was held by that ancient, inescapable recognition. In Simon’s right temple, a pulse began to beat on the brain.

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

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

What was the sensible thing to do?
There was no Piggy to talk sense. There was no solemn assembly for debate nor dignity of the conch.

I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.

If faces were different when lit from above or below — what was a face? What was anything?

I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

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

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

The most solid thing was the light. It smashed through the rows of windows in the south aisle, so that they exploded with colour, it slanted before him from right to left in an exact formation, to hit the bottom yard of the pillars on the north side of the nave. Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension. He blinked at them again, seeing, near at hand, how the individual grains of dust turned over each other, or bounced all together, like mayfly in a breath of wind. He saw how further away they drifted cloudily, coiled, or hung in a moment of pause, becoming, in the most distant rods and trunks, nothing but colour, honey-colour slashed across the body of the cathedral. Where the south transept lighted the crossways from a hundred and fifty foot of grisaille, the honey thickened in a pillar that lifted straight as Abel’s from the men working with crows at the pavement.

He forgot his wounds, his hunger and thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear

Here at last was the imagined but never fully realized place leaping into real life.

We musn't let anything happen to Piggy, must we?