Best Quotes by William Styron (Top 10)
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A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
William Styron
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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
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The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.
William Styron
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my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
William Styron
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What this country needs... what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain - something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been through hellfire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they'll be people again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented cows rooting at the trough.
William Styron
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Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
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I thought there's something to be said for honor in this world where there doesn't seem to be any honor left. I thought that maybe happiness wasn't really anything more than the knowledge of a life well spent, in spite of whatever immediate discomfort you had to undergo, and that if a life well spent meant compromises and conciliations and reconciliations, and suffering at the hands of the person you love, well then better that than live without honor.
William Styron
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It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
William Styron
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[However], the sufferer from depression has no option, and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must ... present a face approximating the one associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod, and frown and, God help him, even smile.
William Styron
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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
William Styron
More William Styron Quotes
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Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.
William Styron
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The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
William Styron
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In depression . . . 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 . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
William Styron
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The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
William Styron
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The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
William Styron
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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
William Styron