Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if, at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle, he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things.
More Quotes from William Golding:
What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.William Golding
He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.
William Golding
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 -- 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
Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
William Golding
He was as fitted to survival in this modern world as a tapeworm in an intestine.
William Golding
Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
William Golding
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