September 19, 1911: Sir William Golding is born.
From his most famous and most controversial work, Lord of the Flies (1954):
This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grown-ups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.
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.
…and the mask was a thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness.
The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.
… maybe there is a beast… What I mean is… maybe it’s only us.
Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.
His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.
‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you?’ said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. ‘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?’
You’ll get back to where you came from.
There was something good about a fire. Something overwhelmingly good.
Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.
Golding won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983.