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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.

William Styron

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William Styron
Age: 81 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 11
Died: 2006
Died: November 1
Military Personnel
Novelist
Writer
Newport News
Virginia
William Clark Styron
Jr.
Mean
Devise
Intolerable
Escape
Means

More quotes by William Styron

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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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Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink.
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The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
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In Vineyard Haven, on Martha's Vineyard, mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea
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Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can't quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.
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my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
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I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.
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Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls
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Let's face it, writing is hell.
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What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
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Many of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow from my opened arteries. The kitchen knives in their drawers had but one purpose for me.
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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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Let your love flow out on all living things.
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For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
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Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
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Most books, like their authors, are born to die of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them they live, and their influence lives forever.
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I felt myself no longer a husk but a body with some of the body's sweet juices stirring again. I had my first dream in many months, confused but to this day imperishable, with a flute in it somewhere, and a wild goose, and a dancing girl.
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A great book should leave you with many experiences.
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The pain is unrelenting one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
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