Quote

The Navy's a very gentlemanly business. You fire at the horizon to sink a ship and then you pull people out of the water and say, 'Frightfully sorry, old chap.'

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
Horizon
Ships
Frightfully
Pull
Gentlemanly
Sorry
Chap
Fire
Chaps
Water
Navy
Business
Sink
People
Ship

More quotes by William Golding

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I will tell you what man is. He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out into the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble. But nature stirs a pudding there.
William Golding
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For a small island, the place is remarkably diverse. Writers tend to see things from their own points of view, looking in one direction very much.
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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If I blow the conch and they don't come back then we've had it. We shan't keep the fire going. We'll be like animals. We'll never be rescued. If you don't blow, we'll soon be animals anyway.
William Golding
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Together, joined in effort by the burden, they staggered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure.
William Golding
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He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.
William Golding
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I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.
William Golding
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Heaven lies around us in our infancy.
William Golding
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Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!
William Golding
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They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten.
William Golding
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The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.
William Golding
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The greatest ideas are the simplest.
William Golding
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What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
William Golding
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Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.
William Golding
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To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be
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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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
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I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.
William Golding
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And I've been wearing specs since I was three.
William Golding
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One tries to tell a truth, and one hopes that the truth has a general application rather than just a specific one.
William Golding