Next time there would be no mercy. He looked round fiercely, daring them to contradict.
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.
Sleep is where we touch what is better left unexamined. There, the whole of life is bundled up, dwindled. There the carefully hoarded and enjoyed personality, our only treasure and at the same time our only defense must die into the ultimate truth of things, the black lightning that splits and destroys all, the positive, unquestionable nothingness.
Could a face have been fashioned to fit the attitude of his consciousness where it lay suspended between life and death that face would have worn a snarl.
Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.
There isn't anyone to help you. Only me. And I'm the beast.
This head is for the beast. It's a gift.
Lok was running as fast as he could. His head was down and he carried his thorn bush horizontally for balance and smacked the drifts of vivid buds aside with his free hand.
They tickled under his nostrils and played leapfrog on his thighs. They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned.
You'll get back to where you came from.
History is the nothing people write about a nothing.
I have always understood the Nazis because I am of that sort by nature.
The whole book is posing a question. You think you've won a war - what you've done is finish a war. There was a crime committed in that war the like of which perhaps was never committed in human history. You think about it.
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.
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 part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.
Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.
What they might become in darkness nobody cared to think.
It's simpler to believe in a miracle.
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.
At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing.
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.
Piggy took off his shoes and socks, ranged them carefully on the ledge and tested the water with one toe. 'It's hot!' 'What did you expect?' 'I didn't expect nothing. My auntie-' 'Sucks to your auntie!
Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!
Listen, Ralph. Never mind what's sense. That's gone.
People don't help much.
He forgot his wounds, his hunger and thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear.
As long as there's light we're brave enough.
Here, or nowhere.
The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.
I'd rather there wasn't an afterlife, really. I'd much rather not be me for thousands of years.
If you accept life dully, you can go through it moving not among things but among words.
The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers but won't tell.
A successful novel should interrupt the reader's life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog. In the best novels, the writer's imagination becomes the reader's reality. It glows, incandescent and furious.
Fear can't hurt you any more than a dream. There aren't any beasts to be afraid of on this island . . . .Serve you right if something did get you, you useless lot of cry-babies!
We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
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.
This day promised, like the others, to be a sunbath under a blue dome.
Other people could stand up and speak to an assembly, apparently, without that dreadful feeling of pressure of personality; could say what they would as though they were speaking to only one person.
Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.
He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things. He talked to them, urging them, ordering them. Driven back by the tide, his footprints became bays in which they were trapped and gave him the illusion of mastery.
Which is better – to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill?
You let the fire out.
While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking; and since I was later to claim thinking as my hobby, I came to an even stranger conclusion - namely, that I myself could not think at all.
In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.
There ought to be some mode of life where all love is good, where one love can't compete with another but adds to it.
I was an estructuralist at the age of seven, which is about the right age for it.
What else is there to do?
I'm frightened. Of us.
