Quotes About Guilt

There was guilt for enjoying anything. Especially the joy of forgetting.

As she rode, she tried to tell herself something. / You don't deserve to be this happy, Liesl. You really don't. / Can a person steal happiness? Or is it just another internal, infernal human trick?

He wanted to walk out—Lord, how he wanted to (or at least he wanted to want to)—but he knew he wouldn't. It was much the same as the way he left his family in Stuttgart, under a veil of fabricated loyalty. To live. Living was living. The price was guilt and shame.

Perhaps it was her first realization that criminality spoke for itself. Irrefutable.

To live. Living was living. The price was guilt, and shame.

Living was living. The price was guilt and shame

On the ration cards of Nazi Germany, there was no listing for punishment, but everyone had to take their turn. For some it was death in a foreign country during the war. For others it was poverty and guilt when the war was over, when six million discoveries were made throughout Europe.

innocent Tommy Müller. He still cowered slightly whenever he saw her. "How could I know you were

The thought of missing it was eased when she found a gap in the bodies and was able to see the mound of guilt, still intact. It was prodded and splashed, even spat on. It reminded her of an unpopular child, forlorn and bewildered, powerless to alter its fate. No one liked it. Head down. Hands in pockets. Forever. Amen.

Like most people, I feel ambiguous guilt for my inferiors, ambiguous envy for my superiors, and mandatory low-spirits about the system itself.

Terror, perhaps, is always a confession of illegitimacy.

it swallows gas like a drunk, but a man who lets guilt ruin pleasure is the pincushion of fate.

Coleman: It's always the best ones go to hell. Me, probably straight to heaven I'll go, even though I blew the head off poor dad. So long as I go confessing to it anyways. That's the good thing about being Catholic. You can shoot your dad in the head and it doesn't even matter at all.

Eve took the bite. But instead of the promised benefits, she found herself with a mouthful of distasteful consequences—guilt, fear, and alienation. The fellowship she had enjoyed with God and her husband was broken. Paradise had been lost.

When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something—anything—before it is all gone. —John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.

Your sense of guilt will linger. It will always be part of you. but sharing it, allowing people to love you anyway, will do you the world of good. Secrets need an outlet if they are not to fester and become an unbearable burden.

when a man embarks upon a crime, he is morally guilty of any other crime which may spring from it.

The pressure of the environment cramps art as it cramps behaviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia without a guilt complex; it is the income tax one has to pay for wanting to make others richer.

Pontius Pilate! God will not let you clean your hands of this!

Looking at the letter in his hand) Then what is this if it isn't telling me? Sure, [Larry] was my son. But I think to him [the pilots killed] were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they were

John Proctor's flaw is his failure, until the last moment, to distinguish guilt from responsibility; America's is to believe that it is at the same time both guilty and without flaw.

and when he finally did break, he would take with him his contagious restlessness and dissatisfaction and guilt, his little gestures and phrases and attitudes that stank of their parents and the past, and Scott would relax again and prove to himself that he had settled all that, left if far below him.

God is light (1 John 1:5), as well as love; and because He is such, sin cannot be ignored, its heinousness minimized, nor its guilt cancelled.