Quote

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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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
Way
Sides
Crowd
Hill
Men
Fire
Agreement
Grade
Graze
Animal
Hills
Pointing
Gregarious
Belief
Beliefs
Warming
Thinkers
Enjoy
Crowds
Cows
Enjoys
Three
Prejudice
Thinker
Contradictions
Hands
Thank
Grades
Shouting
Thing
Side
Contradiction
Prejudices

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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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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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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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I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.
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Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind's essential illness.
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Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.
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The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.
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Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.
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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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Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?
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Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.
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The candle-buds opened their wide white flowers....Their scent spilled out into the air and took possession of the island.
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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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The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won't tell.
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What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
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We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.
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I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.
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I do like people to read the books twice, because I write my novels about ideas which concern me deeply and I think are important, and therefore I want people to take them seriously. And to read it twice of course is taking it seriously.
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Maybe half a dozen think they are a community, but, in general terms, I think English writers tend to face outwards, away from each other, and write in their own patch, as it were.
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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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