Guilt Quotes

The interruption did nothing but earn her a similar slap, as I’m sure she knew it would. Sometimes I wondered if my mother spoke up at the wrong time on purpose. As often as we endured my father’s abuse, she had to be aware that it wouldn’t save me from a beating but simply earn her one as well. Or was it that sharing my fate made her feel less guilt-ridden about those things that happened to me?

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

The Shrink always warned me that carriers stay wracked with lifelong guilt. It's not an uplifting thing having turned lovers into monsters. We feel bad that we haven't turned into monsters ourselves--survivor's guilt, that's called. And we feel a bit stupid that we didn't notice our own symptoms earlier. I mean, I'd been sort of wondering why the Atkins diet was giving me night vision. But that hadn't seemed like something to worry about...

~ Scott Westerfeld

And the looks on the faces of my countrymenpassive heads bent arms at their trousers everyone guilty of not being their best of not earning their daily bread the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.

~ Gary Shteyngart

The scene is most beautiful without people in it. People just screw things up. Forget the whole thing, the world, all the living people, I tell myself, and it has a ring of truth to it. The dead are better, aren't they? The dead don't betray or harm. They've already done all they can do. I can't figure out what people mean or who they are or whether they can be trusted, so, forget them. Don't even try anymore. For now at least, forget the living.

~ Jael Mchenry

The summer I turned eleven, I found out that ghosts are real. Guess it's hard to rest nice and easy in your coffin if you got stuff on your mind. Your soul stays chained to earth instead of zipping up to heaven to sing in one of the angel choirs. Sometimes ghosts show up in the msot peculiar places. Sometimes ghosts fool you. Then you are those ghosts that hang around because we have unfinished business. Business that sinks like old crawfish left in a bucket for a week. That's some nasty smell let me tell you. But the most important thing I learned is that ghosts can help you spill your guts before guilt eats you up and leaves a hole that can't ever be fixed no matter how many patches you try to steam iron across it.

~ Kimberley Griffiths Little

Solitude is an interesting companion. It is both enemy and friend, comforter and tormentor. I spent a lot of time in Dun Cinzci's meat locker trying to decide which. Fortunately, when I tired of solitude, I had guilt to keep me company. Guilt is an even more interesting acquaintance than solitude, let me tell you. Solitude is a harsh but essentially benign attendant. Guilt, on the other hand, is a living, breathing creature, cruel and remorseless. It eats you from the inside out; devours what little hope you have left. It feeds on you, growing stronger with every accursed replayed memory, every useless recrimination. ~ Cayal, The Immortal Prince

~ Jennifer Fallon

Here, in Lorrain's poisoned little jewel of a tale (“The Man Who Made Wax Heads”) the consummate achievement of decadent art is caught in miniature. The genius of the artist entangles perpetrators and victims in a sticky web of perverse delights, in which exploitation becomes collusion, the ripples of guilt spread outward, and the real criminal slips away. In the end, responsibility is lodged firmly with the consumer, forced – he must confess – by his own perverse desires, to buy into the values of this particularly black market.

~ Jennifer Birkett

I refer to what is called mysterium iniquitatis, meaning, as I see it, that a crime in the final analysis remains inexplicable inasmuch as it cannot be fully traced back to biological, psychological and/or sociological factors. Totally explaining one’s crime would be tantamount to explaining away his or her guilt and to seeing in him or her not a free and responsible human being but a machine to be repaired. Even criminals themselves abhor this treatment and prefer to be held responsible for their deeds. From a convict serving his sentence in an Illinois penitentiary I received a letter in which he deplored that 'the criminal never has a chance to explain himself. He is offered a variety of excuses to choose from. Society is blamed and in many instances the blame is put on the victim.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

All day we've witnessed each other's crimes. You killed no one today? But how many did you leave to die?

~ Ian Mcewan

Sometimes the guilty one is not the person who has committed the crime, but the person who has created the possibility for it to be committed.

~ Cristiane Serruya

I rushed to the bathroom for every corner of the hospital was suffocating. I got hold of acid-bottle, which was meant for toilet cleaning. As I took it into my hands, I realized I had more filth inside me than a toilet. A toilet could be cleaned by an acid bottle, or a toilet cleaner, but there was no such product that could cleanse a criminal from inside. I felt so ashamed of myself that I couldn’t even look into the eyes of my reflection in the mirror on the wall.

~ Mehek Bassi

Where ever there's guilt there's violence, and if guilt is a smell then violence is a taste: strawberries and formaldehyde and ironish blood.

~ Glen Duncan

...stars are dying all the time. Some explode. Some collapse and cave in on themselves. Those ones become black holes. Others get sucked up inside of them just for getting too close. Guilty by association. Prosecuted for proximity.

~ Kris Kidd

The burdens I carry on my back are in direct correlation to the weight of my ego.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

If you survive, you've got to live with the guilt, and that's more difficult than looking someone in the eye and pulling the trigger. Trust me. I've done both.

~ Sara Grant

If someone wants to be in your life they will find you. If they don't they will find an excuse.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Guilt at least has a purpose, it tells us we’ve violated some ethical code. Ditto for remorse. Those feelings are educational, they manufacture wisdom. But regret—regret is useless.

~ Daniel Smith

For too many women in America are becoming sick with exhaustion and stress as they try to do things that can't be -- shouldn't be -- done. Too many are eaten up by resentment toward their husbands, who are not subject to the same heartless pressures. Too many are becoming anxious and depressed because they are overwhelmed and disappointed. Too many are letting their lives be poisoned by guilt because their expectations can't be met, and because there is an enormous cognitive dissonance between what they know to be right for themselves and what they're told is right for their children. Too many feel out of control.

~ Judith Warner

Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

~ Milan Kundera

When my mother would tell me that she wanted me to have something because she as a child had never had it, I wanted, or I partly wanted, to give it back. All my life I continued to feel that bliss for me would have to imply my mother's deprivation or sacrifice. I don't think it would have occurred to her what a double emotion I felt. I could hardly bear my pleasure for the guilt. There is no wonder that a passion for independence sprang up in me at the earliest age. It took me a long time to manage the independence, (but) I have never managed to handle the guilt. In the act and the course of writing stories, these are the two springs, one bright, one dark, that feed the stream.

~ Eudora Welty

I touched curiosity,I kissed sin, I felt regret,And I was forgiven.But life won't let me forget.

~ J.a. Anum

At home in bed that first night I had patchy, mundane dreams about normal things. It would be nobler and less uncomfortable to write that I tossed sleeplessly.

~ Darin Strauss

I once was a stranger to grace and to God,I knew not my danger, and felt not my load;Though friends spoke in rapture of Christ on the tree,Jehovah Tsidkenu was nothing to me.I oft read with pleasure, to sooth or engage,Isaiah’s wild measure and John’s simple page;But e’en when they pictured the blood sprinkled treeJehovah Tsidkenu seemed nothing to me.Like tears from the daughters of Zion that roll,I wept when the waters went over His soul;Yet thought not that my sins had nailed to the treeJehovah Tsidkenu—’twas nothing to me.When free grace awoke me, by light from on high,Then legal fears shook me, I trembled to die;No refuge, no safety in self could I see—Jehovah Tsidkenu my Saviour must be.My terrors all vanished before the sweet Name;My guilty fears banished, with boldness I cameTo drink at the fountain, life giving and free—Jehovah Tsidkenu is all things to me.Jehovah Tsidkenu! my treasure and boast,Jehovah Tsidkenu! I ne’er can be lost;In Thee I shall conquer by flood and by field,My cable, my anchor, my breast-plate and shield! Even treading the valley, the shadow of death,This “watchword” shall rally my faltering breath;For while from life’s fever my God sets me free,Jehovah Tsidkenu, my death song shall be.

~ Robert Murray Mccheyne

When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.

~ Hilary Mantel

Guilt -- if there was any guilt -- spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed.

~ Philip K. Dick

What has been done to you is one thing. Yet to really suffer, to truly be burdened with guilt and shame, such pain always begins not with what has been done to you—but with what you have done. André Chevalier

~ Nikki Sex

Holding one's self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since violation of standards, rules, and goals are insufficient in its elicitation unless responsibility can be placed on the self. Stigma may differ from other elicitors of shame and guilt, in part because it is a social appearance factor. The degree to which the stigma is socially apparent is the degree to which one must negotiate the issue of blame, not only for one's self but between one's self and the other who is witness to the stigma. Stigmatization is a much more powerful elicitor of shame and guilt in that it requires a negotiation not only between one's self and one's attributions, but between one's self and the attributions of others.

~ Michael Lewis

I'm starting to understand that attempting to be perfect has been the goal of my life. Our lives. Attempting to be this fault-free, smiling person in this loving, happy family that fits so perfectly in this pretty, inoffensive little town. What was so bad about that goal after all? Only that I couldn't do it. That I let everybody down. I've been so down about it, so depressed thinking about all the balls I was trying to juggle that I've dropped, and now the cogs are turning toward total apathy toward it all, everything and all I can think about is that I am a shell of a human being. I'm a pushover. I'm to blame.

~ Abigail Tarttelin

There are some debts that can't be paid with money.

~ Steven J. Carroll

After each dream, Frankie woke with a start, soaked in tears. But she found no relief in the peaceful silence of her room, because there everything was real. And the guilt was too immense to bear. Each time she opened her eyes, she'd quickly shut them. And wish that she had woken up for the very last time.

~ Lisi Harrison

Everyone makes mistakes, Jenna. Everyone has regrets and guilt for things they should have done differently in their lives. Shit happens, and we do the best we can at the time. You can't blame yourself forever.

~ Lara Adrian

When your out of space, your out of place at the same time.

~ Auliq Ice

Your mistakes are to help you develop your purpose, not shame and guilt.

~ Sue Fitzmaurice

There are two kinds of guilt: the kind that drowns you until you’re useless, and the kind that fires your soul to purpose.

~ Sabaa Tahir

12 Things To Ditch For A Great DayBlameGuiltWorryRegretResentmentEntitlementSelf-pityLazinessNegative attitudeFear of embarrassmentUrge to one-up othersYour comfort zone

~ Charles F. Glassman

Explanations are ghosts of guilt, shadows of sympathy, and I have no use for them.

~ Jessica Dawson

Because even if you buried yourself in guilt, you can't go back and change what happened.

~ Katherine Fleet

Any anger I feel vanishes. What is left cannot be described. It is guilt piled onto emptiness and set afire.

~ Bryan Reardon

My guilt is an ocean for me to drown in.

~ Nicola Yoon