|
efb295a
|
I suddenly encountered the face of loneliness, and decided that it was a merciless and ugly face indeed.
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
4929566
|
It was, of course, the memory of Sophie and Nathan's long-ago plunge that set loose this flood [of tears], but it was also a letting go of rage and sorrow for the many others who during these past months had battered at my mind and now demanded my mourning: Sophie and Nathan, yes, but also Jan and Eva -- Eva with her one-eyed mis -- and Eddie Farrell, and Bobby Weed, and my young black savior Artiste, and Maria Hunt, and Nat Turner, and Wan..
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
c54e28a
|
Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being.
|
|
styron
strength-of-character
stress
|
William Styron |
|
a838978
|
Perhaps, he thought, if I only think of this second, this moment, the train won't come at all. Think of the water, think of now.
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
90e8a37
|
I don't see any point in trying to equate one evil with another, or to assign some stupid scale of values. They're both awful! Would
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
e4eed90
|
The most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction.
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
81c155c
|
Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all..
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
6b5984d
|
That I chose Independence Day as the moment to strike was of course a piece of deliberate irony.
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
d2fc173
|
And what else did Christianity accomplish?" he said. "Here's what Christianity accomplished. Christianity accomplished the mob. The mob. It accomplished not only your senseless butchery, the extermination of all those involved in it, black and white, but the horror of lawless retaliation and reprisal--one hundred and thirty-one innocent niggers both slave and free cut down by the mob that roamed Southampton for a solid week, searching venge..
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
71fcd58
|
But my behavior was really the result of the illness, which had progressed far enough to produce some of its most famous and sinister hallmarks: confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memory.
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
5e95749
|
On Major Depression, quoted by the great William Styron of Sophie's Choice & Darkness Visible:
|
|
pain
suffering
stigma
|
William Styron |
|
54723a3
|
I actually shivered at the insincerity that gripped me as I spoke these words: their falseness was shameful. I was sure my coolness would return. I'd just been caught with my guard down. But at the moment I was in shambles. Walking along the deck (adopting my old casual swagger), I jollied up the troops with small talk, put on a frozen grin, and kept murmuring to myself with rhythmic fatuity: You love the marine Corps, it's a terrific war, ..
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
47d1624
|
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 that it is only temporary; more pain will follow.
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
7cbc48b
|
And so you see, dear reader, the death of my friend Sophie forced me to realize that the whole universe is one big concentration camp run by God -- the biggest Nazi of them all! So slavery in Virginia wasn't all that bad. And it was really God's fault anyway. Pretty good tragic insight there. Think I'll crank some Bellamy Brothers and get loaded!
|
|
lies-we-tell-ourselves
|
William Styron |
|
5e5c29e
|
real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring." Beyond"
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
081f478
|
At the age of fifty he was beginning to discover, with a sense of panic, that his whole life had been in the nature of a hangover, with faintly unpleasant pleasures being atoned for by the dull unalleviated pain of guilt. Had he the solace of knowing that he was an alcoholic, things would have been brighter, because he had read somewhere that alcoholism was a disease; but he was not, he assured himself, alcoholic, only self-indulgent, and h..
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
0cf823d
|
AN EXQUISITELY SHARPENED HATRED FOR the white man is of course an emotion not difficult for Negroes to harbor. Yet if truth be known, this hatred does not abound in every Negro's soul; it relies upon too many mysterious and hidden patterns of life and chance to flourish luxuriantly everywhere. Real hatred of the sort of which I speak--hatred so pure and obdurate that no sympathy, no human warmth, no flicker of compassion can make the fainte..
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
4a59946
|
Tamtej jesieni, kiedy moj organizm stopniowo ulegal coraz wiekszemu rozregulowaniu, zaczalem rozumiec, ze moj umysl jest jak archaiczna reczna centrala telefoniczna w malym miasteczku zalewana stopniowo przez fale powodzi: wtyczki przewodow jedna po drugiej wypadaja z gniazd, przerywajac kolejne lacza - w rezultacie niektore funkcje fizjologiczne mojego ciala i prawie wszystkie funkcje psychiczne - zarowno instynktowne, jak i intelektualne ..
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
6c18e2b
|
Dress is important. It's part of being human. It might as well be a thing of beauty, something you take real pleasure in doing. And maybe in the process, give other people pleasure. Though that's secondary.
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
138f23e
|
I mean, I don't know much about the Civil War, but whenever I think of that time--I mean, ever since I've had these fantasies about those generals, those gorgeous young Southern generals with their tawny mustaches and beards, and hair in ringlets, on horseback. And those beautiful girls in crinoline and pantalettes. You would never know that they ever fucked, from all you're able to read." She paused and squeezed my hand. "I mean, doesn't..
|
|
war
sex
history
past
|
William Styron |
|
fc2af24
|
bet gal nedera vienos meiles lyginti su kita
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
34bae20
|
depression, which can be as serious a medical affair as diabetes or cancer.
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
2948e70
|
the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this caldron, because there is no ..
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
e54cf85
|
An extermination center can only manufacture corpses; a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead...
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
724102a
|
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 |
|
a8a8a2e
|
Oh, I would say, you've never understood me, Harry, that not out of vengeance have I accomplished all my sins but because something has always been close to dying in my soul, and I've sinned only in order to lie down in darkness and find, somewhere in the net of dreams, a new father, a new home.
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
ea144da
|
Through some happy accident of heredity he had escaped his father's tediousness, while retaining a little of his mother's jolly high spirits and humor. This did not make him anything special, but at least he was good-natured.
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
9551cd4
|
depression, when it finally came to me, was in fact no stranger, not even a visitor totally unannounced; it had been tapping at my door for decades.
|
|
melancholia
|
William Styron |
|
14c46fc
|
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 |
|
88cc188
|
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 |
|
ba95155
|
For without knowing the white man at close hand, without having submitted to his wanton and arrogant kindnesses, without having smelled the smell of his bedsheets and his dirty underdrawers and the inside of his privy, and felt the casual yet insolent touch of his women's fingers upon his own black arm, without seeing him at sport and at ease and at his hypocrite's worship and at his drunken vileness and at his lustful and adulterous coupli..
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
c6fbd9a
|
What occurred had to do with Will--Sam's fellow slave at Nathaniel Francis's. While submitting to one of his owner's periodical beatings, Will had finally snapped, perpetrating what for a Negro was the gravest of deeds: he had struck Francis back. Not only that, he had struck Francis savagely enough (with a lightwood fagot wrenched from a barnyard stack) as to have broken Francis's left arm and shoulder. Then Will lit out for the woods, and..
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
d9a81d5
|
the fate of Bobby Weed at the hands of white Southern Americans is as bottomlessly barbaric as any act performed by the Nazis during the rule of Adolf Hitler! Do
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
a864845
|
To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush--like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews.
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
4eeebc2
|
This was not judgment day--only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
1837ebd
|
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 helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases. Except in those maladies strictly designated as malignant or degenerative, we expect some kind of treatment and eventual amelioration, by pills or physical therapy or diet or surgery, wi..
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
c0d1fd0
|
I could scarcely remember a time when I was not haunted by the idea of slavery, or was not profoundly conscious of the strange bifurcated world of whiteness and blackness in which I was born and reared. In the Virginia Tidewater region of my beginnings, heavily populated by blacks, society remained firmly in the grip of the Jim Crow laws and their ordinance of a separate and thoroughly unequal way of life. The evidence was blatant and embar..
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
d38925e
|
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 |
|
08dcd3c
|
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 |
|
a1674ff
|
What I mean in simple terms, Reverend, is that once the alarm went out, there was niggers everywhere--who were as determined to protect and save their masters as you were to murder them. They was simply livin' too well!
|
|
|
William Styron |
|
dffd716
|
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 |
|
2312c79
|
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 |
|
fe00102
|
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 |
|
ede5a56
|
Hell, they'd say in the country club locker room, you know how Milt's getting his. Everybody knew, bearing testimony to the fact that suburban vice, like a peeling nose, is almost impossible to conceal. It went all over town, this talk, like a swarm of bees, settling down lazily on polite afternoon sun porches to rise once more and settle down again with a busy murmur among cautious ladylike foursomes on the golf course, buzzing pleasurably..
|
|
|
William Styron |