177 Quotes by 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.

In depression this 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.

I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility – as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.

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.

You live several lives while reading.

Edward was at the stage of drunkenness in which the ego glows like a coal, and brilliant people become more inspired, but in which dull people, fired by the same inspiration, become only more dull.

Maybe that’s the key to happiness – being sort of dumb, not wanting to know any of the answers.

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

I suddenly encountered the face of loneliness, and decided that it was a merciless and ugly face indeed.