Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

by William Styron

“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.”

sense of the triumph of life over death is at the core of The Myth of Sisyphus with its austere message: in the absence of hope we must still struggle to survive, and so we do—by the skin of our teeth.

Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression—in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.

Time hangs heavy in the hospital, and the best I can say for Group Therapy is that it was a way to occupy the hours.

The danger is especially apparent if the young person is affected by what has been termed “incomplete mourning”—has, in effect, been unable to achieve the catharsis of grief, and so carries within himself through later years an insufferable burden of which rage and guilt, and not only dammed-up sorrow, are a part, and become the potential seeds of self-destruction.

In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, For I had lost the right path.

dante