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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.

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.
Teeth
Skins
Absence
Struggle
Hope
Stills
Still
Survive
Must
Skin

More quotes by William Styron

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Let your love flow out on all living things.
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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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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 pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
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Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.
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Writing is a form of self-flagellation.
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Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.
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Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.
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This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
William Styron
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Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
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we each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
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.
William Styron
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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.
William Styron
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Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.
William Styron