guilt Quotes

“I was mighty down-hearted; so I made up my mind I wouldn’t ever go anear that house again, because I reckoned I was to blame, somehow.”

“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.”

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

“It was you who did it, Lily. You didn’t mean it, but it was you.”

“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.”

“Guilt management can be just important as time management for mothers.”

“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 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.”

“Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”

“My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”

″‘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. ”

“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.”

“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.”

If you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

“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.”

“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.”

″‘Go away’, she said to the guilt... Guilt wanted her most when she least wanted it.”

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.”

“I want to confess everything, to hand over the guilt and mistake and anger to someone else.”

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’m well aware that at the back of my mind, thumping quietly like a drumbeat, are the twin horrors of Guilt and Panic.”

“Why am I not dead? I should be dead. It would best for everyone if I were dead.”

“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 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.”

“Thou art the man, Thou the accursed polluter of this land.”

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.

“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.”

“Part of me felt guilty. Was it selfish that I wanted to live, even though my parents were gone?”

“Guilt is a hunter. My conscience mocked me, picking fights like a petulant child. It’s all your fault, the voice whispered.”

“All the running, the hiding, the lies, the killing, for what? The endless circle of revenge: answering pain by inflicting pain. Why did I do it?”

“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.”

“Survival had its price: guilt.”

“Everything was filthy. Especially my conscience.”

“This is the first time I ever felt really actually in danger of hell.”

″ The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him. ”

″‘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.”

“I used to fell a lot of guilt about having depression but then I realized that’s a lot like feeling guilty for having brown hair.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We were a Family, a happy Family, and we stayed that way until I stopped showing up.”

“Yet how much really could you owe other people? Was it endless? ”

“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.”

“Guilt, of course, is feeling bad about one’s actions, but shame is feeling bad about oneself.”

“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.”

“O, would to God that the inclusive verge Of golden metal that must round my brow Were red-hot steel to sear me to the brains!”

“The tyrannous and bloody act is done, The most arch deed of piteous massacre That ever yet this land was guilty of.”

“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!”

“I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open.”

“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.”

“And you told me you wanted children. That more than anything, you wanted to be a mother.”

“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.”

“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. ”

“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.”

“He was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t guilty.”

“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 didn’t say you threw it. I just said ‘Run.’ You should’ve run.”

“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.”

“In defense of her wounded pride he would have torn the offender to pieces with his own hands. And here that offender was he himself.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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… ”

“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.”

“Jason: Anything you or the children want in exile, let me know; I’ll gladly furnish it … Medea: The presents of the wicked are pure poison.”

“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.”

“We’d had three assemblies last year alone, and every time I waited for a giant spotlight to come out of the auditorium ceiling and shine on my seat.”

“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.”

“Mostly, I was feeling guilty at the thought of it. I’d been hiding in sleazy motels, and she’d had no one to talk to.”

“People come here to prosper. You have nothing here. What have you accomplished?”

“The single mothers who are coming to this country, and the children who follow them, are changing the face of immigration to the United States.”

“Where were my instincts? Isn’t the female of the species hardwired to recognize her own offspring?”

“Your pain and anger will pass, but the guilt would remain with you for always.”

“My poor Mum didn’t have any teeth. She’d gone into hospital and they’d taken them all out, every last one. It was because of us kids.”

“He didn’t feel like a hero anymore--he just felt sorry for this poor, hideous girl, and guilty at being the one who had trapped her here.”

“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.”

“He’d seriously thought about leaving alone, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. They needed him. They needed someone to grumble at.”

“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.”

“How do you mourn someone you already let slip away? Are you even allowed to?”

“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.”

“[...] do not damage yourselves By attending only at the hungry altar Of regret and anger and guilt.”

“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.”

“I find that resentment, criticism, guilt and fear cause more problems than anything else.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Is it my fault that Robbie is dead? I wasn’t drivin’. I wasn’t even drinkin.”

“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.”

“You can’t blame yourself forever, Andy. And if you had died instead of Rob, would you want him to be hurting like you are now?”

″‘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?‘”

“Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.”

“I just wonder if they’ve had that feeling too. The one where you realize it’s your fault that something beautiful is dead.”

“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.”

“I’ll find the evidence and before long Duke will get out. You’ll take his place. I’m coming your way, Carter.”

“Your pain and anger will pass, but the guilt would remain with you for always.”

But then I remembered that it had died of paralysis and I felt that I too was smiling feebly as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin.

The instinct of the celibate warned him to hold back. But the sin was there; even his sense of honour told him that reparation must be made for such a sin.

“Peradventure the guilty one stands looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that God sees him.”

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.

They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time.

How can it be otherwise? Why should a wretched man, guilty, we will say, of murder, prefer to keep the dead corpse buried in his own heart, rather than fling it forth at once, and let the universe take care of it!”

“But, not to suggest more obvious reasons, it may be that they are kept silent by the very constitution of their nature. Or,—can we not suppose it?—guilty as they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a zeal for God’s glory and man’s welfare, they shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men; because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better service. So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow while their hearts are all speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid themselves.”

Here was another ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to her.

“I tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician earned from monarch could not have bought such care as I have wasted on this miserable priest! But for my aid, his life would have burned away in torments, within the first two years after the perpetration of his crime and thine.

“It was I, not less than he. Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?”

I said, but now, that there could be no good event for him, or thee, or me, who are here wandering together in this gloomy maze of evil, and stumbling, at every step, over the guilt wherewith we have strewn our path.

“By thy first step awry thou didst plant the germ of evil; but since that moment, it has all been a dark necessity.”

“I only let her go. Mother, if she should die, it would be my fault.”

It is a bad sign; a quiet conscience does not occasion such paleness in the cheeks, and such fever in the hands of a man.

“Can you be a coward?” continued Villefort, with increasing excitement, “you, who could count, one by one, the minutes of four death agonies? You, who have arranged your infernal plans, and removed the beverages with a talent and precision almost miraculous? Have you, then, who have calculated everything with such nicety, have you forgotten to calculate one thing—I mean where the revelation of your crimes will lead you to? Oh, it is impossible—you must have saved some surer, more subtle and deadly poison than any other, that you might escape the punishment that you deserve. You have done this—I hope so, at least.”

“Ah, Danglars!” whispered Caderousse, “you have deceived me—the trick you spoke of last night has been played; but I cannot suffer a poor old man or an innocent girl to die of grief through your fault. I am determined to tell them all about it.”

He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him. But in spite of all the murderer’s horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must use what he has gained by his murder.

She felt that the position in the world that she enjoyed, and that had seemed to her of so little consequence in the morning, that this position was precious to her, that she would not have the strength to exchange it for the shameful position of a woman who has abandoned husband and child to join her lover; that however much she might struggle, she could not be stronger than herself. She would never know freedom in love, but would remain forever a guilty wife, with the menace of detection hanging over her at every instant; deceiving her husband for the sake of a shameful connection with a man living apart and away from her, whose life she could never share. She knew that this was how it would be, and at the same time it was so awful that she could not even conceive what it would end in. And she cried without restraint, as children cry when they are punished.

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face.

“Good God!” he cried, “can it be, can it be, that I shall really take an axe, that I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open... that I shall tread in the sticky warm blood, break the lock, steal and tremble; hide, all spattered in the blood... with the axe.... Good God, can it be?”

“My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”

He felt disgraced, humiliated, guilty, and deprived of all possibility of washing away his humiliation. He felt thrust out of the beaten track along which he had so proudly and lightly walked till then. All the habits and rules of his life that had seemed so firm, had turned out suddenly false and inapplicable.

The memory of all that had happened after her illness: her reconciliation with her husband, its breakdown, the news of Vronsky’s wound, his visit, the preparations for divorce, the departure from her husband’s house, the parting from her son—all that seemed to her like a delirious dream, from which she had waked up alone with Vronsky abroad. The thought of the harm caused to her husband aroused in her a feeling like repulsion, and akin to what a drowning man might feel who has shaken off another man clinging to him. That man did drown. It was an evil action, of course, but it was the sole means of escape, and better not to brood over these fearful facts.

She felt for him with her whole heart, the more because she was pitying him for suffering of which she was herself the cause. “If you can forgive me, forgive me,” said her eyes, “I am so happy.”

“Come, dearest Victor; you alone can console Elizabeth. She weeps continually, and accuses herself unjustly as the cause of his death; her words pierce my heart.”