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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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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 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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Let your love flow out on all living things.
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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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We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.
William Styron
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This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
William Styron
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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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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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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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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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I think it's unfortunate to have critics for friends.
William Styron
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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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Depression...so mysteriously painful and elusive.
William Styron
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Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
William Styron
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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.
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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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.
William Styron
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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