William Styron Quotes

48 quotes in 791 categories

• I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and…
• It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
• 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;…
• I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
• Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
• 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…
• 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…
• The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
• Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink.
• The pain of depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no…
• Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
• 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…
• What this country needs... what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to…
• 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…
• I thought there's something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn't seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe…
• [However], the sufferer from depression has no option, and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and…
• Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self -- to the mediating intellect--…
• Further, Dr. Gold said with a straight face, the pill at optimum dosage could have the side effect of impotence. Until that moment, although I'd…
• This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
• we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.

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