Quotes from William Styron

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.

At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook.

In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute.

Oh, Daddy, I don't know what's wrong. I've tried to grow up—to be a good little girl, as you would say, but everywhere I turn I seem to walk deeper and deeper into some terrible despair. What's wrong, Daddy? What's wrong? Why is happiness such a precious thing? What have we done with our lives so that everywhere we turn—no matter how hard we try not to—we cause other people sorrow?

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.

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.

You live several lives while reading.

In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do - by the skin of our teeth.

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.

This memory of my relative indifference is important because such indifference demonstrates powerfully the outsider's inability to grasp the essence of the illness.

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.

I don't see any point in trying to equate one evil with another, or to assign some stupid scale of values. They're both awful! Would

That I chose Independence Day as the moment to strike was of course a piece of deliberate irony.

And so you see, dear reader, the death of my friend Sophie forced me to realize that the whole universe is one big concentration camp run by God -- the biggest Nazi of them all! So slavery in Virginia wasn't all that bad. And it was really God's fault anyway. Pretty good tragic insight there. Think I'll crank some Bellamy Brothers and get loaded!

depression, which can be as serious a medical affair as diabetes or cancer.

On Major Depression, quoted by the great William Styron of Sophie's Choice & Darkness Visible: From Darkness Visible, William Styron It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia, wholly unknown to normal life.

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?

The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come -- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow.

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.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.

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.

A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. Reading is borrowing!

real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring." Beyond

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