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

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What could be safer than the bus center with its lamps and wheels?
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How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?
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the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.
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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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At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
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The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.
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Every novel is a biography. Well, then, this is a novel [The Paper Men] which is a biography that is pretending to be an autobiography. That's what you could say about it.
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Worse than madness. Sanity.
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In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.
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You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels.
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What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?
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I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
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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.
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We're not savages. We're English.
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He lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them. Frowning, he tried again.
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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.
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And I've been wearing specs since I was three.
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I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.
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We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.
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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