William Styron

This was not judgement day — only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.

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

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

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

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

Her [Sophie] thought process dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. "I can't choose! I can't choose!"

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.

It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. … One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.