I recognised uneasily the hand of what I sometimes thought to be my personal nemesis, the spirit of farce.
I stood, in shame and confusion, seeing for the first time despite my anger a different picture of Evie in her life-long struggle to be clean and sweet. It was as if this object of frustration and desire had suddenly acquired the attributes of a person rather than a thing...
Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon’s dead body moved out towards the open sea.
He was so delighted he stood on his head. And this is one of the ways small boys show they’re delighted, they stand on their head and waggle their feet in the air.
I condemn and detest my country’s faults precisely because I am so proud of her many virtues.
Eyes shining, mouths open, triumphant, they savored the right of domination. They were lifted up: were friends.
The boys were dancing. The pile was so rotten, and now so tinder-dry, that whole limbs yielded passionately to the yellow flames that poured upwards and shook a great beards of flame twenty feet in the air. For yards round the fire the heat was like a blow, and the breeze was a river of sparks. Trunks crumbled to a white dust.
I want the truth of things. But there’s nowhere to find it.
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. At last Simon gave up and looked back; saw the white teeth and dim eyes, the blood – and his gaze was held by that ancient, inescapable recognition. In Simon’s right temple, a pulse began to beat on the brain.
The two boys faced each other. There was a brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled common sense.
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.
Piggy was calling him a kid. Another voice told him not to be a fool; and the darkness and desperate enterprise gave the night a kind of dentist’s chair reality.
All the warm salt water of the bathing pool and the shouting and splashing and laughing were only just sufficient to bring them together again.
The trouble is: Are there ghosts, Piggy? Or beasts?” “ ‘Course there aren’t.” “Why not?” “’Cos things wouldn’t make sense. Houses an’ streets, an’ – TV – they wouldn’t work.
I’m frightened. Of us. I want to go home. Oh God, I want to go home.
The rules!” shouted Ralph. “You’re breaking the rules!” “Who cares?” Ralph summoned his wits. “Because the rules are the only thing we’ve got!
You wouldn’t care if I was dead. Nobody’d care. That’s all you want, just my damned body, not me. Nobody wants me, just my damned body. And I’m damned and you’re damned with your cock and your cleverness and your chemistry-.
In mezzo a loro, col corpo sudicio, i capelli sulla fronte e il naso da pulire, Ralph piangeva per la fine dell’innocenza.
The folly isn’t mine. It’s God’s folly. Even in the old days he never asked men to do what was reasonable.
I’m going up the mountain.” The words came from Jack viciously, as though they were a curse.
You never loved me, nobody never loved me. I wanted to be loved, I wanted somebody to be kind to me – I wanted-” She wanted tenderness. So did I; but not from her. She was no part of high fantasy and worship and hopeless jealousy. She was the accessible thing.