An extermination center can only manufacture corpses; a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead...
I felt loss at every hand. The loss of self-esteem is a celebrated symptom, and my own sense of self had all but disappeared, along with any self-reliance. This loss can quickly degenerate into depend...
A faint mist of perspiration clung to her skin like aphrodisia,
In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched...
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...
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 of...
On Major Depression, quoted by the great William Styron of Sophie's Choice & Darkness Visible:
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it." -- William Styron (born June 11 1925)
The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy thro...
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...
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, melanchol...
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 ta...
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 sens...
On Major Depression, quoted by the great William Styron of Sophie's Choice & Darkness Visible:From Darkness Visible, William Styron"It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia,...
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....
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 myse...
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 joy...
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: Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most...
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
Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.
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