Quotes About Guilt

Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy?

Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.

His question reminded me of how easy he had been to deceive, so easy that he seemed to me almost a conniver at his wife's unfaithfulness, as the man who leaves loose banknotes in a hotel bedroom connives at theft, and I hated him for the very quality which had once helped my love.

What I've done is far worse than murder - that's an act, a blow, a stab, a shot: it's over and done, but I'm carrying my corruption around with me. It's the coating of my stomach.' He threw her wrists aside like seeds towards the stony floor. 'Never pretend I haven't shown my love.

He was filled with horror at the thought of what a child becomes, and what the dead must feel watching the change from innocence to guilt and powerless to stop it

It is astonishing the sense of innocence that goes with sin--only the hard and careful man and the saint are free of it.

What's the good? he'll always be innocent, you can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.

They killed him because he was too innocent to live.

The lieutenant said, 'Have you seen enough?' speaking savagely, almost as though I had been responsible for these deaths. Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.

Perhaps soon the two of them would grow accustomed to each other and guilt would come to eat out of his hand.

Father Quixote thought: How many times I have felt guilty as he does without knowing why. Sometimes he envied the certitude of those who were able to lay down clear rules--Father Heribert Jone, his bishop, even the Pope. Himself, he lived in a mist, unable to see a path, stumbling.

I didn't bother to ask him why he didn't wait for someone from the American Legation, for I knew the reason. French methods are a little old-fashioned by our cold standards: they believe in the conscience, the sense of guilt, a criminal should be confronted with his crime, for he may break down and betray himself. I told myself again I was innocent

I had felt myself not merely incapable of love – many are incapable of that, but even of guilt. There were no heights and no abysses in my world – I saw myself on a great plain, walking and walking on the interminable flats.

You can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless.

It's not easy to live with someone you've injured.

Execution shed

To know that we are only angels weighed down by filth, free of guilt? The bacteria in our bellies are responsible for the farts which shame us, tiny monsters shitting in their billions all over our pure skin create the acid reek of our sweat. And Slade: when the inner voices tell us we're unworthy or instruct us to love and hate, despite our best instincts... are these incessant distracting thoughts our own? Or do we only hear the voice of the eternal germ screaming in our heads?

Marty knew about rituals. "That means we're supposed to do something a certain way so we won't feel guilty," he said. "You got it," Harry said. Marty

You yourself are guilty of a crime when you do not punish crime.

As Peggy snored beside him, Tom pondered the Greek and Hebrew legends of the scapegoat. Pharmakos to the Greeks, Azazel to the Hebrews. A shameful human practice, he'd always thought, one born from guilt and superstition. But most human behavior had grown out of necessity, and he now understood the empirical value of the rituals for which he had felt only contempt before.

Beetles never stop. They gnaw silently and relentlessly. Guilt is like that too.

If she pleaded not guilty, David said she could suggest that the boy had been the agressor, or maybe it was all some teenage fantasy that went too far. Maybe the sex never really happened. Mary Kay saw that scenario as ridiculous. Almost laughable. She didn't think it would work. I'm carrying his baby, she said. Scratch that.

There were a lot of reasons why visiting those files was unnerving. But one above the others niggled at her subconscious. Guilt is like a dripping faucet that can never be tightened or turned off. Even when the guilt is undeserved. More so, rightly, when it is.

Shame has a way of cutting one off from everyone one knows. Especially those who might forgive.