{"author":"William Styron","author_id":"William+Styron","total_quotes":33,"quotes":[{"text":"We would have to settle for the elegant goal of becoming ourselves.","author":"William Styron","tags":["right"],"id":867,"author_id":"William+Styron"},{"text":"On Major Depression, quoted by the great William Styron of Sophie's Choice \u0026 Darkness Visible:From Darkness Visible, William Styron'It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia, wholly unknown to normal life.","author":"William Styron","tags":["depression","pain","stigma","suffering"],"id":6303,"author_id":"William+Styron"},{"text":"It has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.","author":"William Styron","tags":["comprehension","depressed","depression","health","mental-illness","pain","sufferer","sympathy","torment","understanding"],"id":6874,"author_id":"William+Styron"},{"text":"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. ","author":"William Styron","tags":["writing"],"id":14923,"author_id":"William+Styron"},{"text":"What this country needs... What this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain - something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been through hellfire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they’ll be people again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented cows rooting at the trough.","author":"William Styron","tags":["destruction","grief","usa"],"id":23205,"author_id":"William+Styron"},{"text":"In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched by art, is a misshapen man. An incomplete man.","author":"William Styron","tags":["art","literature","science","styron"],"id":27872,"author_id":"William+Styron"},{"text":"A good book should leave you....Slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.","author":"William Styron","tags":["books"],"id":30470,"author_id":"William+Styron"},{"text":"For those who have dwelt in depression's dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell's black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as 'the shining world.' There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond de.","author":"William Styron","tags":["depression","despair","restored"],"id":53419,"author_id":"William+Styron"},{"text":"At any rate, during the few hours when the depressive state itself eased off long enough to permit the luxury of concentration, I had recently filled this vacuum with fairly extensive reading and I had absorbed many fascinating and troubling facts.","author":"William Styron","tags":["concentration","depressed","depression","facts","reading","vacuum"],"id":83500,"author_id":"William+Styron"},{"text":"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.","author":"William Styron","tags":["writing"],"id":84580,"author_id":"William+Styron"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":33,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}