Carolina QuotesThe Consumers Union Report on Smoking was an aid to my stopping a two-pack-a-day habit which commenced in early infancy. For myself, after two or three days of great flaccidity of spirit, an aimless oral yearning, aching moments of hunger at the pit of the stomach, and an awful intermittent urge to burst into tears, the problem resolved itself, and in less than a week all craving vanished. Curiously, for the first time in my life, I developed a racking cough, but this, too, disappeared. A sense of smugness, a kind of fatness of soul, is the reward for such a struggle.
William Styron Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Essay, 'The Habit' [pub. New York Review of Books, December 26 1963] - p.66, 67
- work
- This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)
- year
- 1963
- locator
- p.66
Cite this record
“The Consumers Union Report on Smoking was an aid to my stopp…” William Styron. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E2B3804E7B. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e2b3804e7b
More from William Styron
Grieving, yet somehow unbending, steadfast, unafraid, the voice rose through the evening like memory, and a gust of wind blew up from the river, dimming the song, rustling the trees, then died and became still. I’ll lay in de grave and stretch out my arms … Suddenly the voice ceased, and all was quiet. Then what I done was wrong, Lord? I said. And if what I done was wrong, is there no redemption? I raised my eyes upward but there was no answer, only the gray impermeable sky and night falling fast over Jerusalem.
Her thought process dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. "I can't choose! I can't choose!"
Neither the Protestant church nor Anglo-American law was equipped to cope with the staggering problem of the status of the Negro: forced to choose between regarding him as a moral human being and as property, they chose the definition of property. The result was the utter degradation of a people. It was an oppression unparalled in human history. This is the problem we are faced with today: too many white Americans still deny the Negro his position as a moral human being.