Guilt Quotes

Because any guilt the sizeof a speck of dust, or shame,can crush even the best of men,in mountains of weight

~ Phil Volatile

Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.

~ Gregory Maguire

The more she laughs, the more he ups the ante with his clowning. By the time he finishes he will have run through all the secret mysteries of laughter that human beings have ever understood, mobilizing everything at his disposal. There is no way for him to know how guilty it makes his mother feel, seeing such a young child go to such lengths just to wring a bit of apparent happiness from her, or that her laughter will all eventually run out.

~ Han Kang

We drove down Corydon avenue towards my mother's apartment. How are you doing, she asked me? Fine, fine, I said. I wanted to tell her that I felt I was dying from rage and that I felt guilty about everything and that when I was a kid I woke up every morning singing, that I couldn't wait to leap out of bed and rush out of the house into the magical kingdom that was my world, that dust made visible in sunbeams gave me real authentic joy, that my sparkly golden banana-seated bike with the very high sissy bar took my breath away, the majesty of it, that it was mine, that there was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine, and that now I wake up every morning reminding myself that control is an illusion, taking deep breaths and counting to ten trying to ward off panic attacks and hoping that my own hands hadn't managed to strangle me while I slept.

~ Miriam Toews

I always ended up doing things I didn’t want to do today just so I didn’t regret not doing them tomorrow.

~ Hilary Grossman

Sometimes people feel they need to control everything, as if they could! Matters of life and death are out of your hands. The more you come to realize this, the harder you try to prove that you can control SOMETHING, anything. All you can really control is your response to what happens. You cannot control matters of life or death and because of this you are not accountable. You cannot be held liable for anything that you have no power over. Guilt, shame and blame make no sense when circumstances are beyond your control.

~ Kate Mcgahan

Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment.

~ Jennifer Birkett

When silence greeted her question, she looked at Caine—for that was how he saw himself in that moment and in all the moments after: his brother’s murderer.

~ V.s. Carnes

His remorse was purely physical. Only his body, strained nerves, and cowering flesh were afraid of the drowned man. Conscience played no part in his terrors, and he had not the slightest regret about killing Camille; in his moments of calm, when the spectre was not present, he would have committed the murder over again had he thought his interests required it.

~ Émile Zola

My hands are of your colour, but I shame To wear a heart so white.

~ William Shakespeare

To show resentment at a reproach is to acknowledge that one may have deserved it.

~ Tacitus

Part of the problem was that I couldn't seem to get past the fact that I hadn't tried to escape from Kas. Even in France, when he'd left me on my own for several days, I'd carried on working [as a prostitute] and doing all the things he'd told me to d. And although I knew that it was because of the fear he'd so carefully and deliberately instilled in me, I still felt as though I'd somehow colluded in what had happened to me - despite knowing, deep down, that nothing could have been further from the truth.

~ Sophie Hayes

For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling vaguely guilty.

~ William S. Burroughs

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips.

~ Salman Rushdie

Guilt is never to be doubted.

~ Franz Kafka

Sometimes to escape the noise of haunting memories, you need your best friends hand in your own, to help erase the sound and fill you with a sense of peace, even if it’s temporary.

~ Andrea Michelle

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES when we go against our instincts? What are the consequences of not speaking out? What are the consequences of guilt, shame, and doubt?

~ Terry Tempest Williams

In Revenge, as in life, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In the end the guilty always fall.

~ Emily Thorne

It takes more courage to be yourself than to live in the prison of ego with feelings of guilt. It takes a lot more courage to be happy than to be unhappy.

~ Human Angels

He was clearly not the murderer whom Hawksmoor was seeking, but it was generally the innocent who confessed: in the course of many enquiries, Hawksmoor had come across those who accused themselves of crimes which they had not committed and who demanded to be taken away before they could do more harm. He was acquainted with such people and recognised them at once - although they were noticeable, perhaps, only for a slight twitch in the eye or the awkward gait with which they moved through the world. And they inhabited small rooms to which Hawksmoor would sometimes be called: rooms with a bed and a chair but nothing besides, rooms where they shut the door and began talking out loud, rooms where they sat all evening and waited for the night, rooms where they experienced blind panic and then rage as they stared at their lives. And sometimes when he saw such people Hawksmoor thought, this is what I will become, I will be like them because I deserve to be like them, and only the smallest accident separates me from them now.

~ Peter Ackroyd

Guilt is a useless feeling. It's never enough to make you change direction- only enough to paralyze you and make you... well, useless.

~ Daniel Nayeri

There is no need for me to curse you -the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred.

~ Thornton Wilder

You can't stay young forever. Being young is a privilege. God knows, how many of them in their death bed wished to be young again and they regretted all the things they should have and should not have done.

~ Diyar Harraz

All I could think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorms room. Or maybe they'd realized I got my Essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.

~ Rick Riordan

Maybe there's more we all could have done, but we just have to let the guilt remind us to do better next time.

~ Veronica Roth

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

~ Oscar Wilde

Calvin : There's no problem so awful, that you can't add some guilt to it and make it even worse.

~ Bill Watterson

So full of artless jealousy is guilt,It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.

~ William Shakespeare

Diana knew it wouldn't be right, but then she told herself that things only looked wrong when there was someone to see you.

~ Anna Godbersen

You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind but it's not always kind to be gentle and soft, there's a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be.

~ Tony Kushner

No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.

~ Stefan Zweig

I wish I could say I felt guilty for what I did. I don't.

~ Veronica Roth

A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.

~ Khaled Hosseini

Okay.I will go.But only ifyou will give meyour guiltto takewith me.

~ Lisa Schroeder

We see our sins reflected everywhere: in the pallor of our intimates’ faces, in the scratching of tree branches against windows, in the strange movements of everyday objects. These may be messages from God or tricks of the eye, but in neither case are we permitted to ignore them.

~ Anna Godbersen

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

~ David Sedaris

Guilt is a useless feeling. It's never enough to make you change direction--only enough to make you useless.

~ Daniel Nayeri

Conscience is what makes a boy tell his mother before his sister does.

~ Evan Esar

When we played softball, I'd steal second base, feel guilty and go back.

~ Woody Allen

To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin