The water rose further and dressed Simon’s coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble...
Percival was mouse-coloured and had not been very attractive even to his mother.
They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.
They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate.
The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers but won’t tell.
We’re not savages. We’re English.
Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!
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.
Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?
Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express mankind’s essential illness.
What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?
We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.
You’ll get back to where you came from.
Are we savages or what?
We have a disharmony in our natures. We cannot live together without injuring each other.
It wasn’t until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you’ve got to write your own books and nobody else’s, and then everything followed from there.
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.
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.
I am here; and here is nowhere in particular.
This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.