“Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.
The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?"
And the answer: "Where was man?”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“There are friends one makes at a youthful age in whom one simply rejoices, for whom one possesses a love and loyalty mysteriously lacking in the friendships made in after-years, no matter how genuine.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but yes, a human being.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“Let your love flow out on all living things.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“Mercifully, I was at that age when reading was still a passion and thus, save for a happy marriage, the best state possible in which to keep absolute loneliness at bay. I could not have made it through those evenings otherwise.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“Then I resolved that I would go back out there and somehow cope with the situation, despite the fact that I lacked a strategy and was frightened to the pit of my being.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“It was, of course, the memory of Sophie and Nathan's long-ago plunge that set loose this flood [of tears], but it was also a letting go of rage and sorrow for the many others who during these past months had battered at my mind and now demanded my mourning: Sophie and Nathan, yes, but also Jan and Eva -- Eva with her one-eyed mis -- and Eddie Farrell, and Bobby Weed, and my young black savior Artiste, and Maria Hunt, and Nat Turner, and Wanda Muck-Horch von Kretschmann, who were but a few of the beaten and butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the earth. I did not weep for the six million Jews or the two million Poles or the one million Serbs or the five million Russians -- I was unprepared to weep for all humanity -- but I did weep for these others who in one way or another had become dear to me, and my sobs made an unashamed racket across the abandoned beach; then I had no more tears to shed, I lowered myself to the sand...and slept...When I awoke it was nearly morning...I heard children chattering nearby. I stirred...Blessing my resurrection, I realized that the children had covered me with sand, protectively, and that I lay as safe as a mummy beneath this fine, enveloping overcoat.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“I suddenly encountered the face of loneliness, and decided that it was a merciless and ugly face indeed.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“Dress is important. It's part of being human. It might as well be a thing of beauty, something you take real pleasure in doing. And maybe in the process, give other people pleasure. Though that's secondary.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“I don’t see any point in trying to equate one evil with another, or to assign some stupid scale of values. They’re both awful! Would”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“I mean, I don't know much about the Civil War, but whenever I think of that time—I mean, ever since Gone With the Wind I've had these fantasies about those generals, those gorgeous young Southern generals with their tawny mustaches and beards, and hair in ringlets, on horseback. And those beautiful girls in crinoline and pantalettes. You would never know that they ever fucked, from all you're able to read." She paused and squeezed my hand. "I mean, doesn't it just do something to you to think of one of those ravishing girls with that crinoline all in a fabulous tangle, and one of those gorgeous young officers—I mean, both of them fucking like crazy?"
"Oh yes," I said with a shiver, "oh yes, it does. It enlarges one's sense of history.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“Someday I will understand Auschwitz. This was a brave statement but innocently absurd. No one will ever understand Auschwitz. What I might have set down with more accuracy would have been: Someday I will write about Sophie's life and death, and thereby help demonstrate how absolute evil is never extinguished from the world. Auschwitz itself remains inexplicable. The most profound statement yet made about Auschwitz was not a statement at all, but a response.
The query: "At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God?"
And the answer: "Where was man?”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“..bet gal nedera vienos meilės lyginti su kita”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“the fate of Bobby Weed at the hands of white Southern Americans is as bottomlessly barbaric as any act performed by the Nazis during the rule of Adolf Hitler! Do”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” Beyond”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush—like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“This was not judgment day—only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“Those strange creepy people, all picking at their little... scabs,” she had complained to me when Nathan was not around. “I hate this type of—and here I thought she used a lovely gem of a phrase—“unearned unhappiness!”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“An extermination center can only manufacture corpses; a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead...”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“I was still in this state of being a little girl and thinking that this wonderful life so comfortable and safe and secure would continue forever. Mama”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“the repressiveness of a society in general is directly proportionate to its harsh repression of sexual language.” What”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“more often than not the person one loves from whom one withholds the most searing truths about one’s self, if only out of the very human motive to spare groundless pain. But”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“During that spring afternoon’s jaunt in the company of one of Poland’s most influential anti-Semites, her admirer Walter Dürrfeld, like his host, uttered not a word about Jews. Six years later almost all that she heard from Dürrfeld’s lips concerned Jews and their consignment to oblivion.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“Military men are capable of abominable crimes; witness, in our recent time alone, Chile, My Lai, Greece. But it is a "liberal" fallacy that equates the military mind with real evil and makes it the exclusive province of lieutenants or generals; the secondary evil of which the military is frequently capable is aggressive, romantic, melodramatic, thrilling, orgasmic. Real evil, the suffocating evil of Auschwitz—gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring—was perpetrated almost exclusively by civilians.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“Despoiled and exploited like the South, and like it, a poverty-ridden, agrarian, feudal society, Poland has shared with the Old South one bulwark against its immemorial humiliation, and that is pride. Pride and the recollection of vanished glories.”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“Is it best to know about a child's death, even one so horrible, or to know that the child lives but that you will never, never see him again?”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
“in modern times most of the mischief ascribed to the military has been wrought with the advice and consent of civil authority. As”
― William Styron, quote from Sophie's Choice
William Styron
Born place: in Newport News, Virginia, The United States
Born date June 11, 1925
See more on GoodReads
“CUSTOMER: I’m always on night shift at work.
BOOKSELLER (jokingly): Is that why you’re buying so many vampire novels?
CUSTOMER (seriously): You can never be too prepared.”
― Jen Campbell, quote from Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops
“-Excuse me,- I said, but my voice seemed to disappear into the dark.
It was my body. In this gloomy, cramped box, I had eaten poison plants and died, hidden away from prying eyes.
Crouching down at the door, I wept. For my dead self.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from Revenge
“Don't stop to understand. You may never understand. Just keep going.”
― Andrew Pyper, quote from The Demonologist
“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. ~ Douglas Adams”
― Mara Jacobs, quote from Worth the Effort
“You are too arrogant for your own good. I officially de-mate you. Go away. I never want to see you again. Except maybe tonight. Naked. Your place. But after that, no more.”
― Katie MacAlister, quote from You Slay Me
Everything You and I...
All Our Names
Rattlesnake
The Line
Walden and other wri...
The Long GoodbyeBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
