Top 180 William Golding Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Which is better – to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?”

— William Golding

52. “Couldn’t a fire outrun a galloping horse?”

— William Golding

53. “Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.”

— William Golding

54. “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...”

— William Golding

55. “The trouble is: Are there ghosts, Piggy? Or beasts?” “ ‘Course there aren’t.” “Why not?” “’Cos things wouldn’t make sense. Houses an’ streets, an’ – TV – they wouldn’t work.”

— William Golding

56. “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

57. “I’m frightened. Of us. I want to go home. Oh God, I want to go home.”

— William Golding

58. “The deep sea breaking miles away on the reef made an undertone less perceptible than the susurration of the blood.”

— William Golding

59. “Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon’s dead body moved out towards the open sea.”

— William Golding

60. “Eyes shining, mouths open, triumphant, they savored the right of domination. They were lifted up: were friends.”

— William Golding

61. “The boys were dancing. The pile was so rotten, and now so tinder-dry, that whole limbs yielded passionately to the yellow flames that poured upwards and shook a great beards of flame twenty feet in the air. For yards round the fire the heat was like a blow, and the breeze was a river of sparks. Trunks crumbled to a white dust.”

— William Golding

62. “Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.”

— William Golding

63. “I am astonished at the ease with which uninformed persons come to a settled, a passionate opinion when they have no grounds for judgment.”

— William Golding

64. “The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.”

— William Golding

65. “Here at last was the imagined but never fully realized place leaping into real life.”

— William Golding

66. “The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers but won’t tell.”

— William Golding

67. “They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.”

— William Golding

68. “There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.”

— William Golding

69. “And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”

— William Golding

70. “The greatest ideas are the simplest. Now there was something to be done they worked with passion.”

— William Golding

71. “The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.”

— William Golding

72. “And I’ve been wearing specs since I was three.”

— William Golding

73. “The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away. Once there was this and that; and now-and the ship had gone.”

— William Golding

74. “How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?”

— William Golding

75. “The sun in the west was a drop of burning gold that slid nearer and nearer the sill of the world. All at once they were aware of the evening as the end of light and warmth.”

— William Golding

76. “Piggy once more was the centre of social derision so that everyone felt cheerful and normal.”

— William Golding

77. “The sun in the west was a drop of burning gold that slid nearer and nearer the sill of the world.”

— William Golding

78. “We need an assembly, not for cleverness, but for setting things straight.”

— William Golding

79. “Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling; and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved further along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon’s dead body moved out towards the open sea.”

— William Golding

80. “Daylight might have answered yes; but darkness and the horrors of death said no.”

— William Golding

81. “Roger’s arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.”

— William Golding

82. “Grownups know things,” said Piggy. “They ain’t afraid of the dark. They’d meet and have tea and discuss. Then things ’ud be all right –.”

— William Golding

83. “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you?′ said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?”

— William Golding

84. “I got this to say. you are acting like a crowd of kids.”

— William Golding

85. “They understood only too well the liberation into savagery that the concealing paint brought.”

— William Golding

86. “Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.”

— William Golding

87. “He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things.”

— William Golding

88. “The flames, as though they were a kind of wild life, crept as a jaguar creeps on its belly toward a line of birch-like saplings that fledged an outcrop of the pink rock.”

— William Golding

89. “The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey the majesty of adult life.”

— William Golding

90. “He noticed, without understanding, how the flames were visible now against the dull light. Evening was come, not with calm beauty but with the threat of violence.”

— William Golding

91. “Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.”

— William Golding

92. “As long as there’s light we’re brave enough.”

— William Golding

93. “We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.”

— William Golding

94. “Piggy was calling him a kid. Another voice told him not to be a fool; and the darkness and desperate enterprise gave the night a kind of dentist’s chair reality.”

— William Golding

95. “His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.”

— William Golding

96. “The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.”

— William Golding

97. “All the warm salt water of the bathing pool and the shouting and splashing and laughing were only just sufficient to bring them together again.”

— William Golding

98. “What’s in a book, is not what an author thought he put into it, it’s what the reader get out of it.”

— William Golding

99. “What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.”

— William Golding

100. “Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.”

— William Golding