Top 80 William Styron Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.”

— William Styron

Featured in: Sad Quotes About Life, Sorrow Quotes, Depression Quotes

2. “A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”

— William Styron

Featured in: Reading Quotes

3. “The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.”

— William Styron

4. “The writer’s duty is to keep on writing.”

— William Styron

5. “Let’s face it, writing is hell.”

— William Styron

6. “Let your love flow out on all living things.”

— William Styron

7. “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

8. “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

9. “We’re all in this game together.”

— William Styron

10. “This was not judgment day – only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.”

— William Styron

11. “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.”

— William Styron

12. “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

13. “In depression this 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.”

— William Styron

14. “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

15. “One of the century’s most famous intellectual pronouncements comes at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

— William Styron

16. “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.”

— William Styron

17. “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

18. “In the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do-by the skin of our teeth.”

— William Styron

19. “Reading – the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.”

— William Styron

20. “In Vineyard Haven, on Martha’s Vineyard, mostly I love the soft collision here of harbor and shore, the subtly haunting briny quality that all small towns have when they are situated on the sea.”

— William Styron

21. “You live several lives while reading.”

— William Styron

22. “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.”

— William Styron

23. “Wickedly funny to read and morally bracing as only good satire can be.”

— William Styron

24. “The weather of Depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.”

— William Styron

25. “It is evil to keep these people in bondage, yet they cannot be freed. They must be educated! To free these people without education and with the prejudice that presently exists against them would be a ghastly crime.”

— William Styron

26. “That I chose Independence Day as the moment to strike was of course a piece of deliberate irony.”

— William Styron

27. “The query: “At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?” And the answer: “Where was man?”

— William Styron

28. “Oh, Daddy, I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve tried to grow up – to be a good little girl, as you would say, but everywhere I turn I seem to walk deeper and deeper into some terrible despair. What’s wrong, Daddy? What’s wrong? Why is happiness such a precious thing? What have we done with our lives so that everywhere we turn – no matter how hard we try not to – we cause other people sorrow?”

— William Styron

29. “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

30. “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

31. “The most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction.”

— William Styron

32. “I don’t see any point in trying to equate one evil with another, or to assign some stupid scale of values. They’re both awful! Would.”

— William Styron

33. “I was still in this state of being a little girl and thinking that this wonderful life so comfortable and safe and secure would continue forever. Mama.”

— William Styron

34. “The pain of severe 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.”

— William Styron

35. “And I think it was a great Frenchman, Voltaire, who said that the beginning of wisdom is the moment when one understands how little concerned with one’s own life are other men, they who are so desperately preoccupied with their own. I knew nothing about you and that boy, nothing at all.”

— William Styron

36. “Oh, I would say, you’ve never understood me, Harry, that not out of vengeance have I accomplished all my sins but because something has always been close to dying in my soul, and I’ve sinned only in order to lie down in darkness and find, somewhere in the net of dreams, a new father, a new home.”

— William Styron

37. “I suddenly encountered the face of loneliness, and decided that it was a merciless and ugly face indeed.”

— William Styron

38. “Those strange creepy people, all picking at their little... scabs,” she had complained to me when Nathan was not around. “I hate this type of – and here I thought she used a lovely gem of a phrase – “unearned unhappiness!”

— William Styron

39. “Doctor, I will be as direct with you as I can. I have long and do still steadfastly believe that slavery is the great cause of all the chief evils of our land. It is a cancer eating at our bowels, the source of all our misery, individual, political, and economic.”

— William Styron

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

— William Styron

41. “A lot of the literature available concerning depression is, as I say, breezily optimistic, spreading assurances that nearly all depressive states will be stabilized or reversed if only the suitable antidepressant can be found; the reader is of course easily swayed by promises of quick remedy... I am hardly able to believe that I possessed such ingenuous hope, or that I could have been so unaware of the trouble and peril that lay ahead.”

— William Styron

42. “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

43. “It was not really alarming at first, since the change was subtle, but I did notice that my surroundings took on a different tone at certain times: the shadows of nightfall seemed more somber, my mornings were less buoyant, walks in the woods became less zestful, and there was a moment during my working hours in the late afternoon when a kind of panic and anxiety overtook me, just for a few minutes, accompanied by a visceral queasiness.”

— William Styron

44. “Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression – in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.”

— William Styron

45. “Hogwash!” he exclaimed. “Christianity is finished and done with. Don’t you know that, Reverend? And don’t you realize further that it was the message contained in Holy Scripture that was the cause, the prime mover, of this entire miserable catastrophe? Don’t you see the plain ordinary evil of your dad-burned Bible?”

— William Styron

46. “But oh, my brothers, black folk ain’t never goin’ to be led from bondage without they has pride! Black folk ain’t goin’ to be free, they ain’t goin’ to have no spoonbread an’ sweet cider less’n they studies to love they own selves. Only then will the first be last, and the last first.”

— William Styron

47. “Maybe that’s the key to happiness – being sort of dumb, not wanting to know any of the answers.”

— William Styron

48. “An extermination center can only manufacture corpses; a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead...”

— William Styron

49. “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. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow.”

— William Styron

50. “The libido also made an early exit, as it does in most major illnesses – it is the superfluous need of a body in beleaguered emergency.”

— William Styron