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. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.

— William Styron

William Styron Quotes

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?

— William Styron

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

— William Styron

An extermination center can only manufacture corpses; a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead...

— William Styron

And when white men in they hate an’ wrath an’ meanness fetches blood from that beautiful black skin then, oh then, my brothers, it is time not fo’ laughing but fo’ weeping an’ rage an’ lamentation! Pride!” I cried after a pause, and let my arms descend. “Pride, pride, everlasting pride, pride will make you free!

— William Styron

It was not really alarming at first, since the change was subtle, but I did notice that my surroundings took on a different tone at certain times: the shadows of nightfall seemed more somber, my mornings were less buoyant, walks in the woods became less zestful, and there was a moment during my working hours in the late afternoon when a kind of panic and anxiety overtook me, just for a few minutes, accompanied by a visceral queasiness.

— William Styron

Such was the vainglory of a black boy who may have been alone among his race in bondage to have actually read pages from Sir Walter Scott and who knew the product of nine multiplied by nine, the name of the President of the United States, the existence of the continent of Asia, the capital of the state of New Jersey, and could spell words like Deuteronomy, Revelation, Nehemiah, Chesapeake, Southampton, and Shenandoah.

— William Styron

The danger is especially apparent if the young person is affected by what has been termed “incomplete mourning” – has, in effect, been unable to achieve the catharsis of grief, and so carries within himself through later years an insufferable burden of which rage and guilt, and not only dammed-up sorrow, are a part, and become the potential seeds of self-destruction. In.

— William Styron

Hogwash!” he exclaimed. “Christianity is finished and done with. Don’t you know that, Reverend? And don’t you realize further that it was the message contained in Holy Scripture that was the cause, the prime mover, of this entire miserable catastrophe? Don’t you see the plain ordinary evil of your dad-burned Bible?

— William Styron

Those strange creepy people, all picking at their little... scabs,” she had complained to me when Nathan was not around. “I hate this type of – and here I thought she used a lovely gem of a phrase – “unearned unhappiness!

— 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.

— William Styron

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.

— William Styron

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.

— William Styron

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.

— William Styron

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.

— William Styron

The libido also made an early exit, as it does in most major illnesses – it is the superfluous need of a body in beleaguered emergency.

— William Styron

For the first time in my life, which had for years been sometimes witlessly gregarious, I discovered the pain of unwanted solitude. Like a felon suddenly thrown into solitary confinement, I found myself feeding off the unburned fat of inward resources I barely knew I possessed.

— William Styron

The query: “At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?” And the answer: “Where was man?

— William Styron

While I was able to rise and function almost normally during the earlier part of the day, I began to sense the onset of the symptoms at midafternoon or a little later- -gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, stifling anxiety.

— William Styron

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?

— William Styron

Most people in the midst of disaster have yet one hope that lingers on some misty horizon – the possibility of love, money coming, the assurance that time cures all hurts, no matter how painful. But Loftis, gazing out at the meadow, had no such assurance; his deposit, it seemed, on all of life’s happiness had been withdrawn in full and his heart had shriveled within him like a collapsed balloon.

— William Styron
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