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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.

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.
Past
Leafs
Mind
Leaf
Like
Stream
Streams
Worse
Brink
Neither
Fold
Suffering
Drift
Future
Folds

More quotes by William Styron

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Let your love flow out on all living things.
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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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Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
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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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Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
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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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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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The stigma of self-inflicted death is for some people a hateful blot that demands erasure at all costs.
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We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
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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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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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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
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I think that one of the compelling themes of fiction is this confrontation between good and evil.
William Styron
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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
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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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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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Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
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Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
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In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind - a struggle which had engaged me for several months - might have a fatal outcome.
William Styron
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Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
William Styron