Free Fall
William Golding
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.”
“I have walked by stalls in the market-place where books, dog-eared and faded from their purple, have burst with a white hosanna. I have seen people crowned with a double crown, holding in either hand the crook and flail, the power and the glory. I have understood how the scar becomes a star, I have felt the flake of fire fall, miraculous and pentecostal. My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are grey faces that peer over my shoulder.”
“My darkness reaches out and fumbles at a typewriter with its tongs. Your darkness reaches out with your tongs and grasps a book. There are twenty modes of change, filter and translation between us. What an extravagant coincidence it would be if the exact quality, the translucent sweetness of her cheek, the very living curve of bone between the eyebrow and hair should survive the passage! How can you share the quality of my terror in the blacked-out cell when I can only remember it and not re-create it for myself? No. Not with you. Or only with you, in part. For you were not there.”
“I cannot convince myself that my mental capacities are important enough to justify either the good or the harm they started.”
“Yet I was wound up. I tick. I exist. I am poised eighteen inches over the black rivets you are reading, I am in your place, I am shut in a bone box and trying to fasten myself on the white paper. The rivets join us together and yet for all the passion we share nothing but our sense of division.”
“I cried out not with hope of an ear but as accepting a shut door, darkness and a shut sky.”
“Let me think in pictures again. If I imagine heaven metaphorically dazzled into colours, the pure white light spread out in a cascade richer than a peacock's tail then I see that one of the colours lay over me. I was innocent of guilt, unconscious of innocence; happy, therefore, and unconscious of happiness. Perhaps the full sheaf of colours is never to be experienced by the human being since if they experience these colours they must lie in the past or on someone else.”
“Something to forgive is a purer joy than geometry.”
“Our mistake is to confuse our limitations with the bounds of possibility . . .”
“Before something happens in the realm of calmness, we do not feel the calmness; only when something happens within it do we find the calmness.”
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Book Keywords:
discovery, meditation, images, opening-paragraph, time, contemplation, feeling, wisdom, chance, limitation, patience, mistakes, perception, action, communication, past, consciousness, empathy, art, change, possibility, contradiction, experience, joy, worldview, awareness, apology, calm, opening-lines, guilt, forgiveness, grudge
