Quotes by William Styron

“E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.”

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.”

“I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell. ”

“A disruption of the circadian cyclethe metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday lifeseems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression; this is why brutal insomn...”

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it." -- William Styron (born June 11 1925)”

“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 ab...”

“When I was first aware that I had been laid low by the disease, I felt a need, among other things, to register a strong protest against the word "depression." Depression, most people know, used to ...”

“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.”

“This sound, which like all music--indeed, like all pleasure--I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the ...”

“For those who have dwelt in depression's dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell's blac...”

“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. If there is mild relief, one knows th...”

“On Major Depression, quoted by the great William Styron of Sophie's Choice & Darkness Visible:From Darkness Visible, William Styron"It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgi...”

“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 rem...”

“The night was blustery and raw, with a chill wet wind blowing down the avenues, and when Rose and I met Franoise and her son and a friend at La Lorraine, a glittering brassiere not far from L'toile...”

“it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved...”

“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 respo...”

“depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy: failure of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the victim, and one that ...”

“At any rate, during the few hours when the depressive state itself eased off long enough to permit the luxury of concentration, I had recently filled this vacuum with fairly extensive reading and I...”

“There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be respo...”

“The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy t...”