William Golding Quotes

At the deepest level people are madder than they want to believe. You will find that they fear being eaten, and are alarmed by their desire to devour others.

But human beings are like that, she thought. We've replaced nearly all our emotions with fear.

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation--overcrowding--reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you're not, what does that mean? Maybe that you're afraid of human contact--of being close to people, of being touched.

It's not the darkness that people fear; it's what they imagine into the darkness.

One shouldn't be afraid of the humans. Well, I am not afraid of the humans, but of what is inhuman in them.

The horror genre gets you in touch with our primal instincts as a people more than any other genre I can think of. It gives you this chance to sort of reflect on who we are and look at the sort of uglier side that we don't always look at, and have fun with that very thing.

I'd say my greatest fear is fear itself.

I have a terrifying long list of fears. Literally everything - diseases, spiders... and people getting tired of me.

What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime - terror.

If we take the generally accepted definition of bravery as a quality which knows no fear, I have never seen a brave man. All men are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened.

I have a scary side of me.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

God! Is there anything uglier than a frightened man!

I do see the good in people, but I also see the bad --- I see it in myself. I know what I'm capable of. Good and bad. It's very imnportant that we make that clear. Just because I often find a way around the darkness doesn't mean tjat I don't know it's there. (Bono)

This overwhelming desire to be close to you directly conflicts with my intense fear of people.

The underground of the city is like what's underground in people. Beneath the surface, it's boiling with monsters.

Ghosts don't scare me. Flesh and blood people do.

You musn’t be afraid of the dark.’ ‘I’m not,’ said Shadow. ‘I’m afraid of the people in the dark.

The ghost is the outward and visible signs of an inward fear.

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate that the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself.

Fairy tales begin with conflict because we all begin our lives with conflict. We are all misfit for the world, and somehow we must fit in, fit in with other people, and thus we must invent or find the means through communication to satisfy as well as resolve conflicting desires and instincts.

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

The finest people, as people go, cannot help but betray a fair portion of fear and insecurity, even full-blown panic.