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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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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.
Somehow
Pervasive
Soon
Clumsy
Hypersensitive
Normal
Frail
Hypochondria
Actually
Detachment
Disjointed
Felt
Odd
Throes
Become
Lacking
Numbness
Body
Emptiness
Fragility
Kind
Particularly
Coordination

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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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We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
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The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
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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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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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A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
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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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The mornings themselves were becoming bad now as I wandered about lethargic, following my synthetic sleep, but afternoons were still the worst, beginning at about three o'clock, when I'd feel the horror, like some poisonous fog bank roll in upon my mind, forcing me into bed.
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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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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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I'm simply the happiest, the placidest, when I'm writing, and so I suppose that that, for me, is the final answer. ... It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.
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The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
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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.
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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 throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
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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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The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
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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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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
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It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
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The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
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