William Golding Quotes

Are we savages or what?

My darkness reaches out and fumbles at a typewriter with its tongs. Your darkness reaches out with your tongs and grasps a book. There are twenty modes of change, filter and translation between us. What an extravagant coincidence it would be if the exact quality, the translucent sweetness of her cheek, the very living curve of bone between the eyebrow and hair should survive the passage! How can you share the quality of my terror in the blacked-out cell when I can only remember it and not re-create it for myself? No. Not with you. Or only with you, in part. For you were not there.

What's in a book, is not what an author thought he put into it, it's what the reader get out of it.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away. Once there was this and that; and now-and the ship had gone.

I cannot convince myself that my mental capacities are important enough to justify either the good or the harm they started.

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.

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.

-Nem nagyon segítenek az emberek!
Azt akarta mondani, hogy az emberek sohasem pontosan olyanok, mint amilyennek elképzeljük őket.

We have to face it at last. We're not all human.

Daylight might have answered yes; but darkness and the horrors of death said no.

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 mans heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

The boys were dancing. The pile was so rotten, and now so tinder-dry, that whole limbs yielded passionately to the yellow flames that poured upwards and shook a great beards of flame twenty feet in the air. For yards round the fire the heat was like a blow, and the breeze was a river of sparks. Trunks crumbled to a white dust.

"He knelt among the shadows and felt his isolation bitterly. They were savages it was true; but they were human and the ambushing fears of the deep night were coming on.

Ralph moaned faintly. Tired though he was, he could not relax and fall into a well of sleep for fear of the tribe. Lying there in the darkness, he knew he was an outcast.

"'Cos I had some sense.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away. Once there was this and that; and now — and the ship had gone.

Caminaron juntos, como dos universos distintos de experiencias y sentimientos, incapaces de comunicarse.