Quotes from William Styron

Sophie slept, understanding with a dreamer's fierce clarity that she was doomed.

And I realize how faulty were my own perceptions, how clumsily I handled the situation, with what lack of wit and with what ineffectiveness did I deal with Nathan at a moment when supreme delicacy was called for… far from my mind was any idea that Nathan might be disturbed. I thought he was merely being a colossal prick. I regarded Nathan's outburst as a shocking failure of character, a lapse of decency, rather than the product of some aberration of mind.

Ephesians Six, Five: Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.

sense of the triumph of life over death is at the core of The Myth of Sisyphus with its austere message: in the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do—by the skin of our teeth.

his disease, whatever it was, resided in shadier corners of his soul—where decisions were reached not through reason but by rationalization, and where a thin membranous growth of selfishness always seemed to prevent his decent motives from becoming happy actions.

la negra noche del alma humana cuando millones de inocentes sufrían y morían bajo la dominación nazi.

greed is not a racial but a human prediliction and

Neath cold sand I dreamed of death / but woke at dawn to see / in glory, the bright, the morning star.

way I dealt with that great classic of modern adventure, Kon-Tiki Months later, watching this book remain first on the best-seller list for unbelievable week after week, I was able to rationalize my blindness by saying to myself that if McGraw-Hill had paid me more than ninety cents an hour I might have been more sensitive to the nexus between good books and filthy lucre.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, Ché la diritta via era smarrita. In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, For I had lost the right path.

I fell onto the bed and lay gazing at the ceiling, nearly immobilized and in a trance of supreme discomfort. Rational thought was usually absent from my mind at such times, hence trance. I can think of no more apposite word for this state of being, a condition of helpless stupor in which cognition was replaced by that "positive and active anguish." And one of the most unendurable aspects of such an interlude was the inability to sleep.

How simultaneously enfeebling and insulting is an empty page! Devoid

Höss was hardly a sadist, nor was he a violent man or even particularly menacing. He might even be said to have possessed a serviceable decency. Indeed

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

Time hangs heavy in the hospital, and the best I can say for Group Therapy is that it was a way to occupy the hours. More

But such wan cheer was an habitual pretense which I knew meant very little, for I was certain to feel ghastly before nightfall. I had come to a point where I was carefully monitoring each phase of my deteriorating condition.

It was as if this man whom they had all so greatly admired, and who had endured so much at the hands of the Nazis -a man of exemplary resilience and courage- had by his suicide demonstrated a frailty, a crumbling of character they were loath to accept.

Bloody and bowed by the outrages of life, most human beings still stagger on down the road, unscathed by real depression. To discover why some people plunge into the downward spiral of depression, one must search beyond the manifest crisis—and then still fail to come up with anything beyond wise conjecture.

A faint mist of perspiration clung to her skin like aphrodisia

O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry; For my soul is full of troubles...

they appeared from where I stood as peaceful as two lovers who had gaily costumed themselves for an afternoon stroll, but on impulse had decided to lie down and nap, or kiss and make love, or merely whisper to each other of fond matters, and were frozen in this grave and tender embrace forever.

The grief is coming now, she said to herself: He's beginning to know what suffering is. Perhaps that's good in a way. Even he. Perhaps that's good for a man—finally to know what suffering is, to know what a woman somehow knows almost from the day she's born.

I was feeling in my mind a sensation close to, but indescribably different from, actual pain.

What causes human beings to inflict upon themselves these stupid little scissor snips of unhappy remembrance?