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It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.

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.
Writing
Jittery
Time
Perpetually
People
Nameless
Threats
Therapy
Scared
Threat
Fine

More quotes by William Styron

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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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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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It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
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Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self -- to the mediating intellect-- as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.
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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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This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
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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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The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
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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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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
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Through the healing process of time-and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases-most people survive depression which may be its only blessing but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.
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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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A great book should leave you with many experiences.
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I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but, yes, a human being.
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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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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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I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility - as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordination. And soon I was in the throes of a pervasive hypochondria.
William Styron
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The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
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Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
William Styron
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The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis.
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