Quotes by William Styron

“I would have done it all again. I would have destroyed them all. Yet I would have spared one. I would have spared her that showed me Him whose presence I had not fathomed or maybe never even known....”

“Her thought process dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. I can't choose! I can't choose!”

“Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz.”

“The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.The query: At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?And the answer: Where was man?”

“Let your love flow out on all living things. These words at some level have the quality of a strapping homily. Nonetheless, they are remarkably beautiful, strung together in their honest lump-like ...”

“’Neath cold sand I dreamed of death / but woke at dawn to see / in glory, the bright, the morning star.This was not judgement day — only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.”

“Even today, many otherwise well-informed people have never heard the name Nat Turner.”

“Neither the Protestant church nor Anglo-American law was equipped to cope with the staggering problem of the status of the Negro: forced to choose between regarding him as a moral human being and a...”

“Numberless factors shape one's needs and longings.”

“The Consumers Union Report on Smoking was an aid to my stopping a two-pack-a-day habit which commenced in early infancy. For myself, after two or three days of great flaccidity of spirit, an aimles...”

“The statistics are meagre, and so we have no way of knowing the number of non-Jews who were murdered in the gas chambers prior to this cut-off date [i.e. 4 April 1943]; not many, compared to the Je...”

“Simon Wiesenthal, the head of the Jewish Center of Documentation in Vienna, expressed his feelings on the matter in a recent interview: [...] I've battled for years with Jewish organisations, warni...”

“Camus's great essay Reflections on the Guillotine was alone almost enough - in its persuasive logic and eloquence - to make me an enemy of capital punishment.”

“The Shabaka [Sundiata Waglini] story illuminates the most sordid defects of capital punishment. His blackness and poverty helped doom him. He was ruthlessly cheated; it was never his privilege to b...”

“To those of us who have suffered severe depression - myself included - this general unawareness of how relentlessly the disease can generate an urge to self-destruction seems widespread; the proble...”

“For General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, military life may be symbolized by beacons flashing across uncharted depths . . . faint bugles sounding reveille, but for many if not most of his countrym...”

“I think it is absolute and unimpeachable testimony to a book's impact on us that we are able to associate it so keenly with the time and the surroundings and the circumstances in which we read it. ...”

“When At Play in the Fields of the Lord was published in 1965 there was revealed in stunning outline the fully realized work of a novelist writing at white heat and at the peak of his powers; [...] ...”