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60c5422
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Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, Che la diritta via era smarrita. In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, For I had lost the right path.
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William Styron |
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5128901
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eponymous
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William Styron |
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df70e8d
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And I realize how faulty were my own perceptions, how clumsily I handled the situation, with what lack of wit and with what ineffectiveness did I deal with Nathan at a moment when supreme delicacy was called for... far from my mind was any idea that Nathan might be disturbed. I thought he was merely being a colossal prick. I regarded Nathan's outburst as a shocking failure of character, a lapse of decency, rather than the product of some ab..
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William Styron |
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b937b3e
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The night was blustery and raw, with a chill wet wind blowing down the avenues, and when Rose and I met Francoise and her son and a friend at La Lorraine, a glittering brassiere not far from L'Etoile, rain was descending from the heavens in torrents. Someone in the group, sensing my state of mind, apologized for the evil night, but I recall thinking that even if this were one of those warmly scented and passionate evenings for which Paris i..
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depression
night
state-of-mind
zombie
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William Styron |
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2d2b9c2
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besotted
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William Styron |
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3c6ae0f
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Time hangs heavy in the hospital, and the best I can say for Group Therapy is that it was a way to occupy the hours. More
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William Styron |
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4248d5e
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In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, For I had lost the right path.
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William Styron |
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32f53ae
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I came to absorb the history of the Virginia Tidewater--that primordial American demesne where the land was sucked dry by tobacco, laid waste and destroyed a whole century before golden California became an idea, much less a hope or a westward dream--I realized that the Dabney farm must have been as nondescript and as pathetic a relic as any of the scores of shrunken, abandoned "plantations" scattered for a hundred miles across the tideland..
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William Styron |
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356c0b6
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Poland is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, soul-split country which in many ways (I came to see through Sophie's eyes and memory that summer, and through my own eyes in later years) resembles or conjures up images of the American South--or at least the South of other, not-so-distant times. It is not alone that forlornly lovely, nostalgic landscape which creates the frequent likeness--the quagmiry but haunting monochrome of the Narew River swam..
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William Styron |
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de3b88b
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You hate men, you've hated Daddy for years, and the sad thing is that he hasn't known it. And the terrible thing is that you hate yourself so much that you just don't hate men or Daddy but you hate everything, animal, vegetable and mineral.
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William Styron |
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2c6c49c
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certain writing instrument--became the objects of my demented possessiveness. Each momentary misplacement filled me with a frenzied dismay, each item being the tactile reminder of a world soon to be obliterated. November wore on, bleak, raw and chill. One Sunday
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William Styron |
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62d60c5
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In debate, especially when the dispute is hot and supercharged and freighted with ill will, I have always been the flabbiest of contenders. My voice breaks, becomes shrill; I sweat. I get a sloppy half-grin on my face. Worse, my mind wanders and then takes flight while the logic I possess in fair measure under more placid circumstances abandons my brain like an ungrateful urchin.
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William Styron |
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83c4d12
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Most people in the midst of disaster have yet one hope that lingers on some misty horizon--the possibility of love, money coming, the assurance that time cures all hurts, no matter how painful. But Loftis, gazing out at the meadow, had no such assurance; his deposit, it seemed, on all of life's happiness had been withdrawn in full and his heart had shriveled within him like a collapsed balloon.
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William Styron |
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2ca35cc
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I don't know what to say." "Don't try," she said, sighing. "Oh, it's so hot!" And thought, Indeed if I consider Charlottesville that will be all. Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the Brink. Which will be soon, and then the dark, and then be done with this ugliness ..."
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William Styron |
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9286852
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I would give almost anything I own to be alive when that day comes, as it surely will, when Harry Byrd sees negro men and women sitting not at the back of the bus but riding free and equal through all the streets of Virginia. For that I would willingly be called that hateful epithet "nigger lover," which I am sure I am called already in private by many,"
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William Styron |
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70ff523
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In my career as a writer I have always been attracted to morbid themes--suicide, rape, murder, military life, marriage, slavery.
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William Styron |
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ce3b533
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During that spring afternoon's jaunt in the company of one of Poland's most influential anti-Semites, her admirer Walter Durrfeld, like his host, uttered not a word about Jews. Six years later almost all that she heard from Durrfeld's lips concerned Jews and their consignment to oblivion.
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William Styron |
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6343e53
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More or less the same can be said for Art Therapy, which is organized infantilism. Our class was run by a delirious young woman with a fixed, indefatigable smile, who was plainly trained at a school offering courses in Teaching Art to the Mentally Ill; not even a teacher of very young retarded children could have been compelled to bestow, without deliberate instruction, such orchestrated chuckles and coos. Unwinding long rolls of slippe..
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William Styron |
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17a0e40
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The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?" And the answer: "Where was man?"
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William Styron |
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4ba9ebb
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Musel jsem se divat na pruzory do plynovych komor a sam sledovat proces smrti... Znovu a znovu se me ptali, jak se ja a moji lide na tyto operace muzeme nepretrzite divat a jak jsme schopni to vydrzet. Ma stala odpoved znela, ze je to otazka zelezneho odhodlani, s jakym musime plnit Hitlerovy rozkazy, a takove odhodlani ze lze ziskat pouze potlacenim vsech lidskych citu.
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czech
world-war-2
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William Styron |
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6a3d873
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There was a time," he said softly, "when I thought I'd found some kind of answer. God, we go through life fooling ourselves, thinking we've got the answer, only it's never the answer really. I thought that being without Maudie would mean something to us. And it did, just for a while. It brought us together. I even stopped drinking. I broke down. I said to hell with this other kind of life. I thought there's something to be said for honor in..
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William Styron |
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e88d83f
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The grief is coming now, she said to herself: He's beginning to know what suffering is. Perhaps that's good in a way. Even he. Perhaps that's good for a man--finally to know what suffering is, to know what a woman somehow knows almost from the day she's born.
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William Styron |
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afd708c
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While I was able to rise and function almost normally during the earlier part of the day, I began to sense the onset of the symptoms at midafternoon or a little later- -gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, stifling anxiety.
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depression
dread
gloom
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William Styron |
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489e1ac
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Our perhaps understandable modern need to full the sawtooth edges of so many of the afflictions we are heir to has led us to banish the harsh old-fashioned words: madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, madness. But never let it be doubted that depression, it its extreme form, is madness.
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William Styron |
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ce87df9
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And then I blurted some words that a lifetime of general equilibrium, and a smug belief in the impregnability of my psychic health, had prevented me from believing I could ever utter; I was chilled as I heard myself speak them to this perfect stranger. "I'm sick," I said, "un probleme psychiatrique."
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William Styron |
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71d111f
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Until that moment, although I'd had some trouble with his personality, I had not thought him totally lacking in perspicacity; now I was not at all sure. Putting myself in Dr. Gold's shoes, I wondered if he seriously thought that this juiceless and ravaged semi-invalid with the shuffle and the ancient wheeze woke up each morning from his Halcion sleep eager for carnal fun.
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William Styron |
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b206a77
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Further, Dr. Gold said with a straight face, the pill at optimum dosage could have the side effect of impotence. Until that moment, although I'd had some trouble with his personality, I had not thought him totally lacking in perspicacity; now I was not at all sure. Putting myself in Dr. Gold's shoes, I wondered if he seriously thought that this juiceless and ravaged semi-invalid with the shuffle and the ancient wheeze woke up each morning f..
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William Styron |
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cc6b4da
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E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
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William Styron |
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d4b0b8a
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A lot of the literature available concerning depression is, as I say, breezily optimistic, spreading assurances that nearly all depressive states will be stabilized or reversed if only the suitable antidepressant can be found; the reader is of course easily swayed by promises of quick remedy...I am hardly able to believe that I possessed such ingenuous hope, or that I could have been so unaware of the trouble and peril that lay ahead.
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William Styron |
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e00c17f
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It was true that I had traveled great distances for one so young, but my spirit had remained landlocked, unacquainted with love and all but a stranger to death...I had absented myself in my smug and airless self-deprivation.
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styron
travel
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William Styron |
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c2222fa
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almost unique in Eastern Europe in possessing its own constitution, called even now "the Magdeburg rights" and based upon medieval laws formulated in the city of Magdeburg? Was"
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William Styron |
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6dc4d9c
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If I am no longer able to function with you, it is, you understand, due to no lack of virility but because almost everything about you, especially your body, leaves me totally without sensation... I
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William Styron |
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5a91ff9
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I did not weep for the six million Jews or the two million Poles or the one million Serbs or the five million Russians -- I was unprepared to weep for all humanity -- but I did weep for these others who in one way or another had become dear to me, and my sobs made an unashamed racket across the abandoned beach
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William Styron |
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7cae46d
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I was so completely dependent on him, you see, and that was not a healthy thing.
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William Styron |
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62520d0
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it is 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.
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William Styron |
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3a40810
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Sophie slept, understanding with a dreamer's fierce clarity that she was doomed.
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William Styron |
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8c440a4
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O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee: Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry; For my soul is full of troubles...
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William Styron |
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3525098
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retaining the other half for yourself in savings for the future. Thereupon, at Mr. Pemberton's good report of your labor--and again I have no doubt that this might be anything but exemplary--I shall draw up the papers for your emancipation. You will then at the age of twenty-five be a free man." He paused and gave my shoulder a soft nudge with his gloved fist, adding: "I shall only stipulate that you return to Turner's Mill for a visit ever..
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William Styron |
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2fcd147
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they appeared from where I stood as peaceful as two lovers who had gaily costumed themselves for an afternoon stroll, but on impulse had decided to lie down and nap, or kiss and make love, or merely whisper to each other of fond matters, and were frozen in this grave and tender embrace forever.
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William Styron |
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c079352
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But I could tell from the way his muscles become stiff and this trembling that ran through him that he was finished with me. Even so I couldn't stop.
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William Styron |
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e16339d
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Somehow I still could not believe that this life we all have together would ever be changed.
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William Styron |
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0d745ea
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Mercifully, I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
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William Styron |
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bc8fcd9
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She was determined to put behind her the madness of the past--or as much as a vulnerable and memory-racked mind permitted--
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William Styron |
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62ae576
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Numberless factors shape one's needs and longings.
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William Styron |