“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 , book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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William Styron 36

American novelist and essayist 1925–2006

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“I had now reached that phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

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Used to look in on the children at night
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“Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. But I could not conquer my sense of guilt, my feeling that the white men around me knew that I was changing, that I had begun to regard them differently.”

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“Desire wears the brain as much as thought wears it. All my being is agog for chances to shine and to be shared.”

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Context: I am looking for the happiness which lives. And truly, when I have a sense of some new assent wavering and making ready, or when I am on the way to a first rendezvous, I feel myself gloriously uplifted, and equal to everything!
This fills my life. Desire wears the brain as much as thought wears it. All my being is agog for chances to shine and to be shared. When they say in my presence of some young woman that, "she is not happy," a thrill of joy tears through me.

“My hope is that by the right process of inquiry and discernment, once the text has been cleansed of its obvious literal sense by undefiled thoughts, the philosophy hidden in the words may be brought to light.”

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“In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious. … The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person's skin had burned off.”

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“My siege is finished.”

René-Aubert Vertot (1655–1735) French historian

Mon siège est fait.
As quoted in Balzac's La Vendetta (1830).
Vertot's reply "when some documents were brought to him for his History of the Order of Malta and the Siege of Rhodes. He had already finished his history and said, when the documents arrived, J'en suis fâché mais, etc. (I am sorry but, etc.)" — as reported in Famous Sayings and Their Authors (1906) by Edward Latham, p. 152; source given is "d'Alembert Réflexions sur l'histoire, read to the French Academy, Jan. 19, 1761."

“Anyone or anything that forces me to fall asleep when I want to stay awake is considered toxic to my senses.”

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“I believe that there is a fundamental mystery in my existence, transcending any biological account of the development of my body (including my brain) with its genetic inheritance and its evolutionary origin.”

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Source: Facing Reality (1970), p. 83
Context: I believe that there is a fundamental mystery in my existence, transcending any biological account of the development of my body (including my brain) with its genetic inheritance and its evolutionary origin. … I cannot believe that this wonderful gift of a conscious existence has no further future, no possibility of another existence under some other unimaginable conditions.

“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.”

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William Styron 36

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