Top 90 William Styron Quotes
#1. The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.
William Styron
#2. I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.
William Styron
#4. The most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction.
William Styron
#5. At any rate, during the few hours when the depressive state itself eased off long enough to permit the luxury of concentration, I had recently filled this vacuum with fairly extensive reading and I had absorbed many fascinating and troubling facts
William Styron
#6. I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.
William Styron
#7. For the first time in my life, which had for years been sometimes witlessly gregarious, I discovered the pain of unwanted solitude. Like a felon suddenly thrown into solitary confinement, I found myself feeding off the unburned fat of inward resources I barely knew I possessed.
William Styron
#8. Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.
William Styron
#9. Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink. Which will be soon, and then the dark, and then be done with this ugliness ...
William Styron
#10. Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
William Styron
#11. I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but yes, a human being.
William Styron
#12. But oh, my brothers, black folk ain't never goin' to be led from bondage without they has pride! Black folk ain't goin' to be free, they ain't goin' to have no spoonbread an' sweet cider less'n they studies to love they own selves. Only then will the first be last, and the last first.
William Styron
#13. My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt.
William Styron
#14. It was true that I had traveled great distances for one so young, but my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with love and all but a stranger to death ... I had absented myself in my smug and airless self-deprivation.
William Styron
#15. For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
William Styron
#16. I never said I hated the Marine Corps! I only said it was no place for a sensitive, civilized, self-respecting human being.
William Styron
#17. Dress is important. It's part of being human. It might as well be a thing of beauty, something you take real pleasure in doing. And maybe in the process, give other people pleasure. Though that's secondary.
William Styron
#18. Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self
to the mediating intellect
as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.
William Styron
#19. Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
William Styron
#20. Though it is a painful fact that most Negroes are hopelessly docile, many of them are filled with fury, and the unctuous coating of flattery which surrounds and encases that fury is but a form of self-preservation.
William Styron
#21. Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being.
William Styron
#22. Writing for me is the hardest thing in the world, but also a thing which, once completed, is the most satisfying ... I am no prodigy but, Fate willing, I think I can produce art.
William Styron
#23. Counted my money and reckoned my total worth at something less than fifty dollars. Although, as I said, I was without real fear in my plight, I could not help feeling a trifle insecure, especially
William Styron
#24. The libido also made an early exit, as it does in most major illnesses - it is the superfluous need of a body in beleaguered emergency.
William Styron
#25. There are friends one makes at a youthful age in whom one simply rejoices, for whom one possesses a love and loyalty mysteriously lacking in the friendships made in after-years, no matter how genuine.
William Styron
#26. Through some happy accident of heredity he had escaped his father's tediousness, while retaining a little of his mother's jolly high spirits and humor. This did not make him anything special, but at least he was good-natured.
William Styron
#27. Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
William Styron
#28. I felt myself no longer a husk but a body with some of the body's sweet juices stirring again. I had my first dream in many months, confused but to this day imperishable, with a flute in it somewhere, and a wild goose, and a dancing girl.
William Styron
#29. The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
William Styron
#30. That I chose Independence Day as the moment to strike was of course a piece of deliberate irony.
William Styron
#31. I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
William Styron
#32. Edward was at the stage of drunkenness in which the ego glows like a coal, and brilliant people become more inspired, but in which dull people, fired by the same inspiration, become only more dull.
William Styron
#33. Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats ... for jittery people.
William Styron
#34. An extermination center can only manufacture corpses; a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead...
William Styron
#35. Yet if she did not quite exist in the full flood of sunlight, which is the hackneyed metaphor for good health, she was comfortably and safely far away from that abyssal darkness down into which she had nearly strayed.
William Styron
#37. Mercifully, I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay. I could not have made it through those evenings otherwise.
William Styron
#38. No, I wasn't trying to make Nat Turner look stupid. I was trying to make him more human. More like me. Angry, impotent, confused about his own sexuality. Wait a minute, that didn't come out right. Is that microphone really on?
William Styron
#39. I was still in this state of being a little girl and thinking that this wonderful life so comfortable and safe and secure would continue forever. Mama
William Styron
#40. A cat loped across my gaze with a squint-eyed, piratical look, and a suave grin.
William Styron
#41. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
William Styron
#42. It is evil to keep these people in bondage, yet they cannot be freed. They must be educated! To free these people without education and with the prejudice that presently exists against them would be a ghastly crime.
William Styron
#43. One of the century's most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
William Styron
#44. Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.
William Styron
#47. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched by art, is a misshapen man. An incomplete man.
William Styron
#48. This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
William Styron
#49. When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer.
William Styron
#50. Perhaps, he thought, if I only think of this second, this moment, the train won't come at all. Think of the water, think of now.
William Styron
#51. I had now reached that phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering.
William Styron
#53. A good book should leave you ... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
William Styron
#54. almost unique in Eastern Europe in possessing its own constitution, called even now "the Magdeburg rights" and based upon medieval laws formulated in the city of Magdeburg? Was
William Styron
#55. A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
William Styron
#57. Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
William Styron
#58. Depression ... so mysteriously painful and elusive ...
William Styron
#59. Depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy: failure of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the victim, and one that helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases.
William Styron
#60. Remember. Oh, remember. How remember moments of forgotten time? Where is the way now (she wondered) through that dark up-spreading wood? Leaf, locust, sunlight in the hollow, all those she had known, all had fled like years. Now silence sounds where no light falls, and she has lost the way.
William Styron
#61. In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind - a struggle which had engaged me for several months - might have a fatal outcome.
William Styron
#62. We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
William Styron
#63. To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush - like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews.
William Styron
#64. servomechanism in which a moral vacuum had been so successfully sucked clean of every molecule of real qualm or scruple that his own descriptions of the unutterable crimes he perpetrated daily seem often to float outside and apart from evil, phantasms of cretinous innocence. Yet
William Styron
#65. It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.
William Styron
#66. Depression, which can be as serious a medical affair as diabetes or cancer.
William Styron
#67. The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
William Styron
#68. Oh, I would say, you've never understood me, Harry, that not out of vengeance have I accomplished all my sins but because something has always been close to dying in my soul, and I've sinned only in order to lie down in darkness and find, somewhere in the net of dreams, a new father, a new home.
William Styron
#69. My brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
William Styron
#70. He was made uneasy by unbraked hilarity and by extremes of sorrow alike, especially the latter; he preferred life to sail along pleasantly and evenly, and this, he knew, was for him a minor sort of tragedy.
William Styron
#71. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
William Styron
#72. You hate men, you've hated Daddy for years, and the sad thing is that he hasn't known it. And the terrible thing is that you hate yourself so much that you just don't hate men or Daddy but you hate everything, animal, vegetable and mineral.
William Styron
#73. I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
#74. I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer ... It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.
William Styron
#75. Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression - in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.
William Styron
#76. But my behavior was really the result of the illness, which had progressed far enough to produce some of its most famous and sinister hallmarks: confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memory.
William Styron
#78. Maybe that's the key to happiness - being sort of dumb, not wanting to know any of the answers.
William Styron
#79. And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.
William Styron
#80. In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do-by the skin of our teeth.
William Styron
#81. I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
William Styron
#82. history's greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.
William Styron
#83. Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
William Styron
#84. You live several lives while reading [a good book].
William Styron
#85. In Vineyard Haven, on Martha's Vineyard, mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea
William Styron
#86. We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
William Styron
#87. Those strange creepy people, all picking at their little ... scabs," she had complained to me when Nathan was not around. "I hate this type of - and here I thought she used a lovely gem of a phrase - "unearned unhappiness!
William Styron
#88. Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls
William Styron
#89. And I think it was a great Frenchman, Voltaire, who said that the beginning of wisdom is the moment when one understands how little concerned with one's own life are other men, they who are so desperately preoccupied with their own. I knew nothing about you and that boy, nothing at all.
William Styron
#90. The mornings themselves were becoming bad now as I wandered
about lethargic, following my synthetic sleep, but afternoons were
still the worst, beginning at about three o'clock, when I'd feel the
horror, like some poisonous fog bank roll in upon my mind, forcing me
into bed.
William Styron
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