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I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.

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.
Fire
Universe
Felt
Men
Released
Burning
Slavery
Ready

More quotes by William Styron

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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
William Styron
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The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
William Styron
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I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
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A disruption of the circadian cycle—the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday life—seems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression this is why brutal insomnia so often occurs and is most likely why each day’s pattern of distress exhibits fairly predictable alternating periods of intensity and relief.
William Styron
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My life and work have been far from free of blemish, and so I think it would be unpardonable for a biographer not to dish up the dirt.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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The pain of depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.
William Styron
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Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
William Styron
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In depression . . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
William Styron
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Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
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For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.
William Styron
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I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
William Styron
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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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The pain is unrelenting one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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A great book should leave you with many experiences.
William Styron