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

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The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won't tell.
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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.
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My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
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Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
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Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.
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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.
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Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against this as a method, but it is not what English writers do.
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I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.
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There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.
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Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.
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The water rose further and dressed Simon's coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble.
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My father was very musical, and music plays quite a large part in my life.
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He doesn't mind if he dies... indeed, he would like to die but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep but not at the price of falling to it.
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Maybe, he said hesitantly, maybe there is a beast. The assembly cried out savagely and Ralph stood up in amazement. You, Simon? You believe in this? I don't know, said Simon. His heartbeats were choking him. [...] Ralph shouted. Hear him! He's got the conch! What I mean is . . . maybe it's only us. Nuts! That was from Piggy, shocked out of decorum.
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Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
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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
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I do think that art that doesn't communicate is useless.
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How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?
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No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.
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We just got to go on, that's all. That's what grownups would do.
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