On Major Depression, quoted by the great William Styron of Sophie's Choice & Darkness Visible:
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...
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,...
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)
A faint mist of perspiration clung to her skin like aphrodisia,
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...
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...
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...
What causes human beings to inflict upon themselves these stupid little scissor snips of unhappy remembrance?
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....
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...
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...
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.
This memory of my relative indifference is important because such indifference demonstrates powerfully the outsider’s inability to grasp the essence of the illness.
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...
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...
An extermination center can only manufacture corpses; a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead...
Real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Beyond
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...
E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.