William Golding Quotes

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.

When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.

I guess I look like a rock quarry that someone has dynamited.

The nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject, Father, Son, are things forgot.

Theres no stink more sorrorful than the stink of wet, burnt paper. It means: the end.

She felt as if the mosaic she had been assembling out of life's little shards got dumped to the ground, and there was no way to put it back together.

The first time I experienced war, I thought the world was ending.

Wars break things; they break stories.

Very little changed fundamentally, except that the proud German soldier had turned into a defeated bundle of misery and the great German army had disintegrated.

Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.

The crisis is not far ahead ... a dismemberment of this Republic I now consider inevitable.

And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you’d read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor.

We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

This thought is as a death.

If we don't come apart; we will come apart.

Here's the funny thing about the world coming to an end. Once it gets going, it doesn't seem to stop.

Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.

Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the heat& smell of gunpowder, making moneyfloat from hand to hand. The next momenta rocket pushes a white fistthrough night sky, & they scatter like birds& fall into the shape their liveshave become.

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppled masonry, and time one livid final flame.

For you know only a heap of broken images

With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded.