Quotes from William Styron

Our perhaps understandable modern need to full the sawtooth edges of so many of the afflictions we are heir to has led us to banish the harsh old-fashioned words: madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, madness. But never let it be doubted that depression, it its extreme form, is madness.

And then I blurted some words that a lifetime of general equilibrium, and a smug belief in the impregnability of my psychic health, had prevented me from believing I could ever utter; I was chilled as I heard myself speak them to this perfect stranger. I'm sick, I said, un problème psychiatrique.

Most people in the grip of depression at its ghastliest are, for whatever reason, in a state of unrealistic hopelessness, torn by exaggerated ills and fatal threats that bear no resemblance to actuality.

A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self—a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it.

the iron determination with which we must carry out Hitler's orders could only be obtained by a stifling of all human emotions.

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started every day.

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.

certain writing instrument—became the objects of my demented possessiveness. Each momentary misplacement filled me with a frenzied dismay, each item being the tactile reminder of a world soon to be obliterated. November wore on, bleak, raw and chill. One Sunday

But the hospital also offers the mild, oddly gratifying trauma of sudden stabilization—a transfer out of the too familiar surroundings of home, where all is anxiety and discord, into an orderly and benign detention where one's only duty is to try to get well.

For me the real healers were seclusion and time.

there is only one way out—up the chimney.' He

Until that moment, although I'd had some trouble with his personality, I had not thought him totally lacking in perspicacity; now I was not at all sure. Putting myself in Dr. Gold's shoes, I wondered if he seriously thought that this juiceless and ravaged semi-invalid with the shuffle and the ancient wheeze woke up each morning from his Halcion sleep eager for carnal fun.

When you think of all the bad people - Poles, Germans, Russians, French, all nationalities - all these evil people who escaped, people who killed Jews who are alive right now. In Germany. And places like Argentina. And my father - this good man - who had to die! Isn't that enough to make you not believe in this God. Who can believe in God who turn His back on people like that?

If there are Jews in this group, you have no right to live more than two weeks.' Then he said, 'Any nuns here? Like the priests, you have one month. All the rest, three months.

Both of us put up a brave front about it all, but a love affair, like some prodigy of plastic surgery, is flesh laid on to living flesh and to break it up is to tear off great hunks and parts of yourself.

She had not planned to weep—it was the last thing from her mind, a display of mawkish weakness—but she could not help it.

In debate, especially when the dispute is hot and supercharged and freighted with ill will, I have always been the flabbiest of contenders. My voice breaks, becomes shrill; I sweat. I get a sloppy half-grin on my face. Worse, my mind wanders and then takes flight while the logic I possess in fair measure under more placid circumstances abandons my brain like an ungrateful urchin.

But I did not write any such letter that evening. Because when I returned to the house I encountered Sophie in the flesh for the first time and fell, if not instantaneously, then swiftly and fathomlessly in love with her. It was a love which, as time wore on that summer, I realized had many reasons for laying claim to my existence.

But I could tell from the way his muscles become stiff and this trembling that ran through him that he was finished with me. Even so I couldn't stop.

It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this caldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.

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

history's greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.

For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of Is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came. —Job

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.