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Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.

William Golding

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William Golding
Age: 81 †
Born: 1911
Born: September 19
Died: 1993
Died: June 19
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Newquay
Cornwall
William Gerald Albert Golding
Sir William Gerald Golding
Straight
Fit
Language
Experience
Like
Jacket
Jackets
Fits

More quotes by William Golding

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We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
William Golding
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No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.
William Golding
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There is, they say, no fool like an old fool.
William Golding
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Heaven lies around us in our infancy.
William Golding
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This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.
William Golding
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A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.
William Golding
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What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
William Golding
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The greatest ideas are the simplest.
William Golding
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For a small island [Great Britain], the place is remarkably diverse.
William Golding
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I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.
William Golding
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I'm scared of him, said Piggy, and that's why I know him. If you're scared of someone you hate him but you can't stop thinking about him. You kid yourself he's all right really, an' then when you see him again it's like asthma an' you can't breathe.
William Golding
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Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
William Golding
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Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
William Golding
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Even if you got rid of paper, you would still have story-tellers. In fact, you had the story-tellers before you had the paper.
William Golding
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I have a confession to make. The love affair of my life has been with the Greek language. I have now reached the age when it has occurred to me that I may have read some books for the last time. I suddenly thought that there are books I cannot bear not to read again before I die. One that stands out a mile is Homer's Iliad.
William Golding
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But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.
William Golding
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It may be -- I hope it is -- redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.
William Golding
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What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?
William Golding
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Beethoven for listening Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature in fact, it is probably wider.
William Golding
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The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.
William Golding