Guilt Quotes

Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food.

~ Khaled Hosseini

He could deal with his guilt all by himself. Guilt didn't add up to love, an emotion she was done with forever.

~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

No amount of guilt can change the past, and no amount of worrying can change the future.

~ Umar Ibn Al-Khattaab

I would forget it fain,But oh, it presses to my memory,Like damnèd guilty deeds to sinners' minds.

~ William Shakespeare

I won't cry. When the guilt is this heavy, you can't. It just settles and stays with you, and it's cold.

~ Bethany Griffin

She raced for him, propelled by the strength of a thousand regrets.

~ Lisi Harrison

Blame has no purpose, and it is a lousy teacher.

~ John Yokoyama

No one else could see all the bodies she’d left behind, but they were there, looking at her. Or maybe that was just her, looking at herself, and not liking what she saw. Knowing she could never escape her own judging gaze.

~ Paolo Bacigalupi

It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water.

~ Marilynne Robinson

How much suffering did you lay on yourself before you awakened and recognized that guilt is deadly, and empty, and profitless?

~ Janny Wurts

Guilt is a destructive and ultimately pointless emotion

~ Lynn Crilly

It is strange the way that someone who wants to find you guilty can start to make you believe in your own guilt, even when you know you are innocent. I was afraid I would condemn myself my mistake.

~ S.j. Parris

Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic--you were made to feel guilty about everything

~ Elizabeth Strout

[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.

~ Christopher Hitchens

It's funny how guilty people start to question your spirituality and education only because they have nothing to say that will justify their faults.

~ J.b. Albano

But year after year that summons, unheard but felt, was disobeyed. His one secret thought became like a chain binding down his spirit and like a serpent gnawing into his heart.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

…In the very simplicity of her desire to punish herself appeared egoism in its purest form. Never before had this woman who seemed to think only of herself experienced an egoism so immaculate.

~ Yukio Mishima

The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.

~ Ernst Jünger

It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

...I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.

~ Robin Sloan

The thought burrowed into her heart as darkness fell. It coiled in her guts as she wedged herself amongst the boughs of a tree to sleep. And in the morning, it woke with her and clung to her back, riding on her shoulders as she climbed down, hungry and exhausted from nightmares.

~ Paolo Bacigalupi

trust me, Anita, if you get dead, especially if he blames himself in any way, he will be a force of destruction looking for a place to be aimed. And he's blamed himself for introducing you to Olaf here from the get-go. If Olaf did to you what he's done to some of his other victims, Edward would drown the world in blood to erase those images.

~ Laurell K. Hamilton

He is talking to people in Toronto, trying to find out if I am guilty; but he won't find it out that way. He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that other have done for you.

~ Margaret Atwood

This guilt is a joke, and it’s exhausting to watch you martyr yourself.

~ Ann Aguirre

I couldn't begin to tell you what terrible trigger for such insanity lies deep in my sub-conscious. Though no doubt some would say that, indeed, it may be some demon of conscience. A deeply buried guilt for some unforgivable depravity. Then again, perhaps not.

~ Angel Rosa

You're making yourself too important. Guilt comes from feeling we're at the center of the universe. We're not.

~ Gloria Whelan

I remember as a child of eight being told by a young friend that I had killed Christ. That was news to me. It's a common experience for the Jewish young. Should later generations of Germans be burdened with the guilt arising from the profound inhumanity of their ancestors? Revenge may be sweet, but guilt is non-transferable. Still, hatreds survive with the persistence of cockroaches.

~ Sid Fleischman

A generous donor (who had no doubt lived a life that imperiled his mortal soul) had granted [the Sisters] more than one hundred waterfront acres.

~ Kristin Hannah

Guilt is basically one of my superpowers. It’s been programmed into me from the moment I was old enough to know what it was.

~ Paula Stokes

Dalgliesh was too experienced to assume that fear implied guilt, it was often the most innocent who were the most terrified.

~ P.d. James

Guilt loves the passive.

~ Jonathan Price

Behjet eased the horse forward again. The harvest is failing. There will be no crop at all if this rain doesn't stop - not even hay.The rain. The rain she'd been so grateful for, the rain that concealed the warping of her shadow. It was going to kill people.

~ Erin Bow

You're an asshole, you know that, Haller?I nodded and headed back to the door.When I need to be.

~ Michael Connelly

Just because you act a little guilty doesn't mean you're innocent.

~ Charlie Chan

But there are some born to do penance by nature. Maybe they lift the load for some of us who take it quite comfortably that we're humankind, and not angels.

~ Ellis Peters

Guilty people apologize and also take steps to avoid repetition. Shame, in contrast, is a more global emotion, which can emerge in response to the same kind of wrong act and violation of standards. It may develop earlier in life than guilt-- guilt requires more cognitive sorting capacity-- but above all it emphasizes self-abasement. It is the self that is at fault, not the commission of the act. This creates greater pain and intensity than guilt. A shamed person feels very bad indeed-- but also makes it more difficult to escape.

~ Peter N. Stearns

Most injuries heal in time, but guilt is a cancer that knows where to hide.

~ Rma Spears

My mother is a certainty. I can count on the watercolour pain in her voice when she calls to say she hasn't heard from me in months. The precarious laughter as she comes from the kitchen, when I finally do appear on her doorstep, the laughter that says I might be a chickadee that's alighted unexpectedly on her thumb.

~ Trevor Cole

My mother may no longer be (if she ever was) a mast to which I can rope myself. But I fear the loss of Lesley. Without her observance, and her sturdy presence, I would feel windblown.

~ Trevor Cole

Redemption was asking too much, but he could hope. Something told him he’d still be seeking absolution when he took his last breath on some distant day.

~ Kelly Moran