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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 Darkness Visible (1990)

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Mind

More quotes by William Styron

It could be all unwittingly that I wrote in Darkness Visible what amounted to a Rosetta stone for my other work.

Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz.

Sophie's Choice (1979)

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.

Writers at Work (1958)

Surely mankind has yet to be born. Surely this is true!

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)

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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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Styron (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.