Quotes from William Styron

Doctor, I will be as direct with you as I can. I have long and do still steadfastly believe that slavery is the great cause of all the chief evils of our land. It is a cancer eating at our bowels, the source of all our misery, individual, political, and economic.

such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.

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

Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, 'good time' and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of the living damnation?

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

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.

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.

Aushwitze itself remains explicable. The most profound statement yet made upon Aushwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query, 'At Aushwitze, tell me, where was God?' And the answer: 'Where was man?

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.

A lot of the literature available concerning depression is, as I say, breezily optimistic, spreading assurances that nearly all depressive states will be stabilized or reversed if only the suitable antidepressant can be found; the reader is of course easily swayed by promises of quick remedy...I am hardly able to believe that I possessed such ingenuous hope, or that I could have been so unaware of the trouble and peril that lay ahead.

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

loss. Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression—in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin

I was so completely dependent on him, you see, and that was not a healthy thing.

In my career as a writer I have always been attracted to morbid themes—suicide, rape, murder, military life, marriage, slavery.

the repressiveness of a society in general is directly proportionate to its harsh repression of sexual language." What

They had begun just lately—rumors about the Loftises, rumors about "another woman," whisperings which disturbed him not so much because they concerned the Loftises—whom he didn't know too well, in any case—but because they upset his notions about the prevalence of human decency.

outrageously at his temples (by then his need to do something had become like a panic, a fierce drive up ward and outward from his self that had begun to cut like flame through the boozy dreamland, the nit-picking, the inertia, the navel-gazing), said loudly and impatiently: "What do you mean there is not a hope in the world?

more often than not the person one loves from whom one withholds the most searing truths about one's self, if only out of the very human motive to spare groundless pain. But

During that spring afternoon's jaunt in the company of one of Poland's most influential anti-Semites, her admirer Walter Dürrfeld, like his host, uttered not a word about Jews. Six years later almost all that she heard from Dürrfeld's lips concerned Jews and their consignment to oblivion.

it is more often than not the person one loves from whom one withholds the most searing truths about one's self, if only out of the very human motive to spare groundless pain.

Despoiled and exploited like the South, and like it, a poverty-ridden, agrarian, feudal society, Poland has shared with the Old South one bulwark against its immemorial humiliation, and that is pride. Pride and the recollection of vanished glories.

Is it best to know about a child's death, even one so horrible, or to know that the child lives but that you will never, never see him again?

absolute evil paralyzes absolutely. In

in modern times most of the mischief ascribed to the military has been wrought with the advice and consent of civil authority. As