Top 180 William Golding Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Roger stooped, picked up a stone, aimed and threw it at Henry-threw it to miss. The stone, that token of preposterous time, bounced five yards to Henry’s right and fell in the water. Roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them. Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.”

— William Golding

102. “The two boys faced each other. There was a brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled common sense.”

— William Golding

103. “Philosophy and Religion-what are they when the wind blows and the water gets up in lumps?”

— William Golding

104. “Suddenly, pacing by the water, he was overcome with astonishment. He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable amount of one’s waking life was spent watching one’s feet.”

— William Golding

105. “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

106. “I’m warning you. I’m going to get waxy. D’you see? You’re not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island! So don’t try it on, my poor misguided boy, or else – ” Simon found he was looking into a vast mouth. There was blackness within, a blackness that spread.”

— William Golding

107. “The air was heavy with unspoken knowledge.”

— William Golding

108. “The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.”

— William Golding

109. “Caminaron juntos, como dos universos distintos de experiencias y sentimientos, incapaces de comunicarse.”

— William Golding

110. “Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society... but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another... I must say that 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.”

— William Golding

111. “What could be safer than the bus center with its lamps and wheels?”

— William Golding

112. “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

113. “Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.”

— William Golding

114. “I do think that art that doesn’t communicate is useless.”

— William Golding

115. “But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.”

— William Golding

116. “I’m going up the mountain.” The words came from Jack viciously, as though they were a curse.”

— William Golding

117. “An orotundity, which I define as Nobelitis a pomposity in which one is treated as representative of more than oneself by someone conscious of representing more than himself.”

— William Golding

118. “He forgot his wounds, his hunger and thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear on flying feet, rushing through the forest toward the open beach.”

— William Golding

119. “We’re not savages. We’re English.”

— William Golding

120. “Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry.”

— William Golding

121. “You never loved me, nobody never loved me. I wanted to be loved, I wanted somebody to be kind to me – I wanted-” She wanted tenderness. So did I; but not from her. She was no part of high fantasy and worship and hopeless jealousy. She was the accessible thing.”

— William Golding

122. “I was an estructuralist at the age of seven, which is about the right age for it.”

— William Golding

123. “What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?”

— William Golding

124. “One’s intelligence may march about and about a problem, but the solution does not come gradually into view. One moment it is not. The next it is there.”

— William Golding

125. “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

126. “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.”

— William Golding

127. “If you could shut your ears to the slow suck down of the sea and boil of the return, if you could forget how dun and unvisited were the ferny coverts on either side, then there was a chance that you might put the beast out of mind and dream for a while.”

— William Golding

128. “As for the fear, you’ll have to put up with that like the rest of us.”

— William Golding

129. “Thought was a valuable thing, that got results.”

— William Golding

130. “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.”

— William Golding

131. “Percival Wemys Madison, of the Vicarage, Harcourt St. Anthony, lying in the long grass, was living through circumstances in which the incantation of his address was powerless to help him.”

— William Golding

132. “Listen all of you. Me and my hunters, we’re living along the beach by a flat rock. We hunt and feast and have fun. If you want to join my tribe come and see us. Perhaps I’ll let you join. Perhaps not.”

— William Golding

133. “If only one had time to think!”

— William Golding

134. “We don’t know much about our current selves, do we?”

— William Golding

135. “I condemn and detest my country’s faults precisely because I am so proud of her many virtues.”

— William Golding

136. “I’m frightened. Of us.”

— William Golding

137. “In mezzo a loro, col corpo sudicio, i capelli sulla fronte e il naso da pulire, Ralph piangeva per la fine dell’innocenza.”

— William Golding

138. “Uno tiene miedo porque la gente siempre tiene miedo.”

— William Golding

139. “I stood, in shame and confusion, seeing for the first time despite my anger a different picture of Evie in her life-long struggle to be clean and sweet. It was as if this object of frustration and desire had suddenly acquired the attributes of a person rather than a thing...”

— William Golding

140. “With lack of sleep and too much understanding I grow a little crazy, I think, like all men at sea who live too close to each other and too close thereby to all that is monstrous under the sun and moon.”

— William Golding

141. “I recognised uneasily the hand of what I sometimes thought to be my personal nemesis, the spirit of farce.”

— William Golding

142. “The sun was bright and danger had faded with the darkness.”

— William Golding

143. “Life itself is a rickety building.”

— William Golding

144. “Now that his physical voice was silent, the inner voice of reason, and other voices too, made themselves heard.”

— William Golding

145. “Some things need no study, no learning, no repetition in pursuit of memory. They burn themselves into the eye and can be examined ever after in minute detail. Moreover it is their nature – as we cannot even think, without leaving a mark somewhere on the cosmos – to bring with them their own inescapable interpretation.”

— William Golding

146. “For if humanity has a future on this planet of a hundred million years, it is unthinkable that it should spend those aeons in a ferment of national self-satisfaction and chauvinistic idiocies.”

— William Golding

147. “If you don’t change your hairstyle because it’s mostly fallen out and you don’t shave, you’ve no cause to go chasing yourself in a mirror.”

— William Golding

148. “I want the truth of things. But there’s nowhere to find it.”

— William Golding

149. “You haven’t got it with you,’ said Jack, sneering. ‘You left it behind. See, clever? And the conch doesn’t count at this end of the island –.”

— William Golding

150. “You are a silly little boy,’ said the Lord of the Flies, ’just an ignorant, silly little boy.”

— William Golding