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3e20090
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It was not really alarming at first, since the change was subtle, but I did notice that my surroundings took on a different tone at certain times: the shadows of nightfall seemed more somber, my mornings were less buoyant, walks in the woods became less zestful, and there was a moment during my working hours in the late afternoon when a kind of panic and anxiety overtook me, just for a few minutes, accompanied by a visceral queasiness.
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depression
melancholia
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William Styron |
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fa1f681
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The libido also made an early exit, as it does in most major illnesses--it is the superfluous need of a body in beleaguered emergency.
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William Styron |
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abb73cb
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Yet I was appalled. For at the same time, such a violent act, even though well provoked and not entirely unheard of, was rare and shocking enough so as to make it likely that an atmosphere of suspicion would close in upon Negroes in general. The gossip would get started: God durned niggers gittin' so they hit back. I was deeply afraid that with such feelings prevalent, our Negroes would become unsettled by the overall mistrust and lose hear..
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William Styron |
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b8809b4
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I suppose the truth is simply that it was possible for benefits like these to accrue only to a Negro lucky enough to remain in the poor but relatively benign atmosphere of Virginia. For here in this worn-out country with its decrepit little farms there was still an ebb and flow of human sympathy--no matter how strained and imperfect--between slave and master, even an understanding (if sometimes prickly) intimacy; and in this climate a black..
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William Styron |
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7c37815
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The fairest state of them all, this tranquil and beloved domain--what has it now become? A nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney's infernal machine, cursed be that blackguard's name! In such a way is our human decency brought down, when we pander all that is in us noble and just to the false god which goes by the vile name of Capital! Oh, Virginia, woe bet..
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William Styron |
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c31af49
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Therefore, they is only one thing to do ..." Here I stopped speaking altogether for a while, allowing these last words to enter their consciousness. Minutes passed and they said nothing, then Henry's voice broke the silence, his deaf man's bleat hoarse and cracked, a shock in the stillness: "Us gotta kill all dem white sonsabitches. Ain't dat what de Lawd done told you? Ain't dat right, Nat?" It was as if by those words we were committed. U..
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William Styron |
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79444d2
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I reckon even you didn't know the actual statistics, hiding out until now like you done. But in the three days and nights that your campaign lasted you managed to hasten fifty-five white people into early graves, not counting a score or so more fearfully wounded or disabled--hors de combat, as the Frenchies say, for the rest of their natural lives. And only God knows how many poor souls will be scarred in their minds by grief and by terribl..
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William Styron |
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1433e16
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My mother, alone among all the Negroes at Turner's Mill, had been laid honorably to rest in the family plot among white folks (scant yards away, indeed, from the unsentimental Benjamin, now spinning in his coffin) with a marble headstone not one inch smaller nor a shade less white than theirs. I am no longer oppressed by the fact (as I was for so many years after I had grown to manhood and was able to reflect long and hard on these matters)..
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William Styron |
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e76b1d5
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Hogwash!" he exclaimed. "Christianity is finished and done with. Don't you know that, Reverend? And don't you realize further that it was the message contained in Holy Scripture that was the cause, the prime mover, of this entire miserable catastrophe? Don't you see the plain ordinary evil of your dad-burned Bible?"
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William Styron |
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08482ac
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It is I am sure a kind of unorthodoxy, and considered thus by some," I hear my master say (I resume my station, still flustered and with a madly working heart), "but it is my conviction that the more religiously and intellectually enlightened a Negro is made, the better for himself, his master, and the commonweal."
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William Styron |
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3c2ebbd
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Remember. Oh, remember. How remember moments of forgotten time? Where is the way now (she wondered) through that dark up-spreading wood? Leaf, locust, sunlight in the hollow, all those she had known, all had fled like years. Now silence sounds where no light falls, and she has lost the way.
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William Styron |
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c2ec80e
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Military men are capable of abominable crimes; witness, in our recent time alone, Chile, My Lai, Greece. But it is a "liberal" fallacy that equates the military mind with real evil and makes it the exclusive province of lieutenants or generals; the secondary evil of which the military is frequently capable is aggressive, romantic, melodramatic, thrilling, orgasmic. Real evil, the suffocating evil of Auschwitz--gloomy, monotonous, barren, bo..
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ordinary-people
military
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William Styron |
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2122c30
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Despoiled and exploited like the South, and like it, a poverty-ridden, agrarian, feudal society, Poland has shared with the Old South one bulwark against its immemorial humiliation, and that is pride. Pride and the recollection of vanished glories.
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poland
nationalism
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William Styron |
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e3cf04b
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Is it best to know about a child's death, even one so horrible, or to know that the child lives but that you will never, never see him again?
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tragedy
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William Styron |
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df44129
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la negra noche del alma humana cuando millones de inocentes sufrian y morian bajo la dominacion nazi.
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William Styron |
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9859c44
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That the word "indescribable" should present itself is not fortuitous, since 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 ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension ha..
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William Styron |
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2c9a193
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For the first time in my life, which had for years been sometimes witlessly gregarious, I discovered the pain of unwanted solitude. Like a felon suddenly thrown into solitary confinement, I found myself feeding off the unburned fat of inward resources I barely knew I possessed.
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William Styron |
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813697e
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such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.
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William Styron |
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11a0e64
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One of the century's most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy"
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William Styron |
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38007cf
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One of the things I cannnot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective," Steiner writes, "is the time relation." Steiner has just quoted descriptions of the brutal deaths of two Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp. "Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring and Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms,..
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sophie-s-choice
styron
world-war-two
wwii
holocaust
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William Styron |
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9806e17
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What causes human beings to inflict upon themselves these stupid little scissor snips of unhappy remembrance?
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William Styron |
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060c1c6
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For me the real healers were seclusion and time.
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William Styron |
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39a2938
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She had not planned to weep--it was the last thing from her mind, a display of mawkish weakness--but she could not help it.
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William Styron |
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fbd6f6b
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the repressiveness of a society in general is directly proportionate to its harsh repression of sexual language." What" --
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William Styron |
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2eeaf33
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more often than not the person one loves from whom one withholds the most searing truths about one's self, if only out of the very human motive to spare groundless pain. But
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William Styron |
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432a5a3
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absolute evil paralyzes absolutely. In
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William Styron |
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3aa8c29
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in modern times most of the mischief ascribed to the military has been wrought with the advice and consent of civil authority. As
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William Styron |
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6457516
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greed is not a racial but a human prediliction and
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William Styron |
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ae2530d
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Neath cold sand I dreamed of death / but woke at dawn to see / in glory, the bright, the morning star.
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William Styron |
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b124d2d
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How simultaneously enfeebling and insulting is an empty page! Devoid
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William Styron |
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e3e0713
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Hoss was hardly a sadist, nor was he a violent man or even particularly menacing. He might even be said to have possessed a serviceable decency. Indeed,
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William Styron |
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772554d
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servomechanism in which a moral vacuum had been so successfully sucked clean of every molecule of real qualm or scruple that his own descriptions of the unutterable crimes he perpetrated daily seem often to float outside and apart from evil, phantasms of cretinous innocence. Yet
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William Styron |
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4bd573a
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A faint mist of perspiration clung to her skin like aphrodisia,
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William Styron |
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d6e3dee
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the iron determination with which we must carry out Hitler's orders could only be obtained by a stifling of all human emotions.
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William Styron |
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4d28ed3
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there is only one way out--up the chimney.' He
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William Styron |
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a2ede2d
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If there are Jews in this group, you have no right to live more than two weeks.' Then he said, 'Any nuns here? Like the priests, you have one month. All the rest, three months.
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William Styron |
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b6e85d5
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But I did not write any such letter that evening. Because when I returned to the house I encountered Sophie in the flesh for the first time and fell, if not instantaneously, then swiftly and fathomlessly in love with her. It was a love which, as time wore on that summer, I realized had many reasons for laying claim to my existence.
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William Styron |
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0ef4b2c
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counted my money and reckoned my total worth at something less than fifty dollars. Although, as I said, I was without real fear in my plight, I could not help feeling a trifle insecure, especially
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William Styron |
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b241291
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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 joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber, the voices and the nimble commotion, the perennial tribe of cats and dogs and birds, "laughter and ability and ..
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depression
memoir
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William Styron |
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4afd7e4
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Aushwitze itself remains explicable. The most profound statement yet made upon Aushwitz was not a statement at all, but a response. The query, 'At Aushwitze, tell me, where was God?' And the answer: 'Where was man?
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William Styron |
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da2753c
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history's greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.
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William Styron |
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9f86009
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They had begun just lately--rumors about the Loftises, rumors about "another woman," whisperings which disturbed him not so much because they concerned the Loftises--whom he didn't know too well, in any case--but because they upset his notions about the prevalence of human decency." --
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William Styron |
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63a1d70
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sense of the triumph of life over death is at the core of The Myth of Sisyphus with its austere message: in the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do--by the skin of our teeth.
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William Styron |
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6ce644c
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his disease, whatever it was, resided in shadier corners of his soul--where decisions were reached not through reason but by rationalization, and where a thin membranous growth of selfishness always seemed to prevent his decent motives from becoming happy actions.
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William Styron |