“She was at school, but you’d never know it if you didn’t actually look. She didn’t whip her hand through the air trying to get the teacher to call on her or charge through the halls getting to class. She didn’t make unsolicited comments for the teacher’s edification or challenge the kid who took cuts in the milk line. She just sat. Quiet.
I told myself I should be glad about it—it was like she wasn’t even there, and isn’t that what I’d always wanted? But still, I felt bad.”
“I can’t think of another type of illness where the sufferer is made to feel guilty and question their self-care when their medications need to be changed.”
“Life passes. Then comes the depression. That feeling that you’ll never be right again. The fear that these outbreaks will become more familiar, or worse, never go away. You’re so tired from fighting that you start to listen to all the little lies your brain tells you. The ones that say you’re a drain on your family. The ones that say that if you were stronger or better this wouldn’t be happening to you.”
“After all, guilt and remorse were worthless emotions, weren’t they? Well, I knew they weren’t; but I had no time for them. Forward motion; that was the key. Run as fast as you can and don’t look back.”
“I know I did wrong. No one can feel it more sensibly than I do…Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.”
A terrible, painful sadness clutched at Ellen. More than ever before, she felt that her life—the best part of it, at least, the part that was fresh and fun—was behind her. Recognizing the sensation made her feel guilty, for she read it as proof that she was an unsatisfactory mother, an unsatisfied wife. She hated her life, and hated herself for hating it. She thought of a line from a song Billy played on the stereo: “I’d trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday.”
“I was ready to join [Edward’s] family. The fear and guilt and anguish I was feeling now had taught me that much… The next time something came at us, I would be ready. An asset, not a liability.”
“Guilt struck Little-Faith on the head with a great club that was in his hand and knocked him flat to the ground, where he lay bleeding profusely and in danger of dying. The thieves just stood by watching him bleed to death, but then heard someone coming on the road. They were afraid it might be Great-Grace who lives in the town of Good-Confidence. They quickly departed and left this good man to fend for himself.”
For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and satisfied, drove on into the night.
“I stand in front of the mirror and study my face.…It is the face of a sad, lonely girl something bad has happened to. I wonder if my face will ever look the same again, or if I’ll always see it in my reflection - Finch, Eleanor, loss, heartache, guilt, death.”
“Maybe, if I wear the glasses long enough, I can be like her. I can see what she saw. I can be both of us at once so no one will have to miss her, most of all me.”
I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games.
“We teach girls shame. ‘Close your legs. Cover yourself.’ We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”
“I descended from the top of Olympus, and, a God in a human shape, I surveyed the earth. ’Twere an endless task to enumerate how great an amount of guilt was everywhere discovered.”
“They felt they had you fenced off so that you could not do what you did. Now they’re mad because deep down in them they believe that they made you do it. When people feel that way, you can’t reason with ‘em.”
“She found herself looking at Lane as if he were a stranger, or a poster advertising a brand of linoleum, across the aisle of a subway car. Again she felt the trickle of disloyalty and guilt, which seemed to be the order of the day, and reacted to it by reaching over to cover Lane’s hand with her own. She withdrew her hand almost immediately and used it to pick her cigarette out of the ashtray. ”
“Overcome your guilt. Care, but not too much. Take responsibility, but don’t blame yourself. Protect, save, help- but know when to give up. They’re precarious ledges to walk. How do I do it?”
“It’s no fun picking on you Louis; you’re so guilty, it’s like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there’s no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish.”
“Negrophobes exist. It is not hatred of the Negro, however, that motivates them; they lack the courage for that, or they have lost it. Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. ”
“God is the only being who is good, and the standards are set by Him. Because God hates sin, He has to punish those guilty of sin. Maybe that’s not an appealing standard. But to put it bluntly, when you get your own universe, you can make your own standards.”
“I knew that Phoebe was convinced that her mother was kidnapped because it was impossible for Phoebe to imagine that her mother could leave for any other reason. I wanted to call Phoebe and say that maybe her mother had gone looking for something, maybe her mother was unhappy, maybe there was nothing Phoebe could do about it.”
“It was obvious to everyone that Mafatu was useless upon the sea. He would never earn his proper place in the tribe. Stout Heart- how bitter the name must taste upon his father’s lips!”
″‘Maybe. Maybe there’s more we all could have done,’ he says, ‘but we just have to let the guilt remind us to do better next time.’
I frown and pull back. That is a lesson that members of Abnegation learn—guilt as a tool, rather than a weapon against the self.”
“I press my forehead to the wall and scream. After a few seconds I clamp my hand over my mouth to muffle the sound and scream again, a scream that turns into a sob. The gun clatters to the ground. I still see Will.
He smiles in my memory. A curled lip. Straight teeth. Light in his eyes. Laughing, teasing, more alive in memory than I am in reality. It was him or me. I chose me. But I feel dead too. ”
“This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.”
“Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life.”
“And then it was not a toy lion, but a real lion, The Real Lion, just as she had seen him on the mountain beyond the world’s end. And a smell of all sweet-smelling things there are filled the room. But there was some trouble in Jill’s mind, though she could not think what it was... The Lion told her to repeat the signs, and she found that she had forgotten them all. At that, a great horror came over her.”
“Beg forgiveness, indeed! After fourteen years! I see no purpose to it. The dead are dead; those who remain behind cannot forget. But then, just as I am about to close my heart against Ann, I recollect my part in the madness that came to our village in 1692. And I know I am as guilty as Ann or any of the girls in that circle of accusers.”
″‘I am glad you have come,’ Jesus said. Daniel could say nothing at all. For a moment he was afraid. Only when the man turned away and his eyes no longer held his own, could he breathe freely again.”
“She gathers her papers and moves away as STEVE, arms still outstretched, turns toward the camera. His image is in black and white, and the grain is nearly broken. It looks like one of the pictures they use for psychological testing, or some strange beast, a monster.”
“I knowed very well why [the words] wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all.”
“That night I lay in bed and thought about dying and going to be with my mother in paradise. I would meet her saying, ‘Mother, forgive. Please forgive,’ and she would kiss my skin till it grew chapped and tell me I was not to blame. She would tell me this for the first ten thousand years.”
“I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.”
“Why mundanes always insist on taking responsibility for things that aren’t their fault is a mystery to me. You didn’t force that cocktail down his idiotic throat.”
“And when he couldn’t sleep, he retired to his study and the laudanum bottle that had become his constant companion. Sometimes I’d find him asleep in his chair, the dogs at his feet, the brown bottle close at hand […] he’d grown thinner, whittled down by grief and opium. And I could only stand by, helpless and mute, the cause of it all.”
“STEVE
I thought you you’re supposed to be innocent until you’re proven guilty?
O’BRIEN
That’s true, but in reality it depends on how the jury sees the case.”
“My scream implodes inside me. Mother looks back, sees the dagger lying there, grabs it. The thing howls in outrage. She’s going to fight it. She’s going to be alright. […] In one swift motion, she raises the dagger and plunges it into herself.”
“If you don’t testify, you’ll just make the tie between you and King stronger in the mind of the jury. I think you have to testify. And the way you spend the rest of your youth might well depend on how much the jury believes you.”
“I don’t care if you come home at all. It was the last thing I’d said to her. Before I ran away. Before she came after me. Before I saw her die in a vision. […] And then the scream I’ve been holding back comes pouring out of me… ”
“The charred black spot where Amy’s car had landed sat directly below. It was as if my own jeep had turned against me, breaking down there on purpose to remind me that I was a jerk. Not that I needed reminding.”
“I should have been there for her. She was so totally alone. She should have been there for me. I was so totally alone. We should never have been separated.”
“I killed Grike, he thought. All right, so he was dead already, technically, but he was still a person. He had hopes and plans and dreams, and I put a stop to them all.”
″‘It’s me, brother. Your main man, Roberto. And yes, I’m cold. Very cold. It’s no fun bein’ dead.′
‘I’m sorry, Rob. You know I didn’t mean to hurt you.’
‘Understood, my man. But when’re you comin’ to keep me company?‘”
“I want to pull Finny out of my mind like a splinter so that I can adore Jamie the way he deserves to be adored. And even more than that, because I am a selfish, bad creature, I want to feel that adoration. I want to be free of this guilt.”
“Guilt is always preferable to the thing that might give you brownie points for being a good person but ruin your mental health. Choose guilt over resentment, because guilt is a natural part of life, a thing we can work with and absolve ourselves of, while resentment is something that we heap on other people who weren’t asking for it anyway.”
“By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.”
“But I need to know more. I need to know what happened to my cousin. Maybe only for the sake of knowing- but maybe because I need to hear that it wasn’t my fault.”
“The guilt that the little boy had started to feel, melted away. At first apologetically, then whole-heartedly, he too started to laugh. The barrier of twenty thousand years vanished in the twinkling of an eye.”
“So why do I feel so guilty? I don’t sleep so good at night. I keep seein’ the fire and hearin’ his screams and feelin’ so helpless. He was too young to die like that. It’s not fair. He never had a chance. Was all this done to teach us kids a lesson? Will it stop us from drinkin’ and drivin’? Maybe—a few.”
“There’s some stuff I don’t understand about this accident—like why it happened and why Robbie had to die and why I didn’t die. Mama keeps huggin’ me, sayin’, ‘Praise the Lord’ and stuff like that. But what about Robbie’s mama? What is she saying?”