Quotes About Guilt

Vogue began to focus on the body as much as on the clothes, in part because there was little they could dictate with the anarchic styles...In a stunning move, an entire replacement culture was developed by naming a 'problem' where it had scarcely existed before, centering it on the women's natural state, and elevating it to the existential female dilemma...The number of diet-related articles rose 70 percent from 1968 to 1972...The lucrative 'transfer of guilt' was resurrected just in time.

Very nearly released by the spread of contraception, legal abortion, and the demise of the sexual double standard, that sexuality was quickly restrained once again by the new social forces of beauty pornography and beauty sadomasochism, which arose to put the guilt, shame, and pain back into women's experience of sex.

all that the high cost of holy oil delivers is the assuaging of guilt, of the compulsion to sacrifice. In this way, the great medieval industry of pardons and indulgences reappears as the holy oil industry of today. The value of indulgences is their expense to the penitent. Their primary psychological meaning lies in how much the penitent is willing to sacrifice for the sake of forgiveness.

In our interpretation of the damages done by the beauty myth, it is not yet possible to lay blame anywhere but on oneself. I can say finally, for myself at least: at thirteen, to starve half to death? Not guilty. Not that child. There is certainly a charge of guilt to be made, long overdue. But it doesn't belong to me. It belongs somewhere, and to something, else.

But female fat is the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female fat, because we implicitly recognize that under the myth, women's bodies are not our own but society's, and that thinness us not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community. A cultural cixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

Religious beliefs had little or no effect on a man's sexual pleasure, but could slice as powerfully as the circumcision knife into a woman's enjoyment, undermining with guilt and shame any pleasure she might otherwise experience.

Meinem Eindruck nach ist der arme Martin nicht einmal in der Lage, seine Schugröße niederzuschreiben, und verharrt meistens in einer Art von Fegefeuer, das er in seinem eigenen Kopf aufgebaut hat, wo ihn Gewissensbisse und Schmerz bei lebendigem Leib aufzehren.

All you have to do is convince the sanctimonious that they are free of all sin and they'll start throwing stones, or bombs, with gusto. In fact, it doesn't take much, because they can be convinced with the bare minimum of encouragement and excuses.

When peace finally came, it smelled of the sort of peace that haunts prisons and cemeteries, a shroud of silence and shame that rots one's soul and never goes away. There were no guiltless hands or innocent looks.

Guilt and remorse have no meaning. They are feelings, emotions, not ideas.

Miquel Moliner suffered from that affliction of people who feel guilty when they're not working; although he respected and even envied the leisure others enjoyed, he fled from it. Far from gloating about his manic work ethic, he would joke about his obsessive activity and dismiss it as a minor form of cowardice. While you're working, you don't have to look life in the eye.

La culpa y el remordimiento no tienen significado. Son sentimientos, emociones, no ideas.

Why call it insomnia, when what they mean is conscience?

In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.

In his experience people (hardened criminals apart) who had something to hide and people who had nothing to hide had one thing in common. Faced by a policeman asking questions, they could never remain silent for long.

What did I do wrong with my children? Everett tries to comfort me, but I feel like a complete failure.

That was all he wanted for himself – to give to her. Biff's mouth hardened. He had done nothing wrong but in him he felt a strange guilt. Why? The dark guilt in all men, unreckoned and without a name.

Always he wanted to set her up to something, to give to her. And not only a sundae or some sweet to eat – but something real. That was all he wanted for himself – to give to her. Biff's mouth hardened. He had done nothing wrong but in him he felt a strange guilt. Why? The dark guilt in all men, unreckoned and without a name.

I never believed in God. Not even at school when my priestly teacher drummed the fear and the guilt into us. I believed that he believed it, all right, but I thought he was mad. Delusional. I thought if somebody had to force you that much to believe in something then it wasn't worth believing, that it wasn't natural, you know?

It is what he regrets, what beats him up inside that makes him relive it over and over a thousand times a day.

A year ago it would have torn me up, leaving a body behind as we sped away along the interstate. Now I was just glad it was him and not me who was lying in the woods. I was a terrible Christian and a decent survivalist.

Don't worry about not feeling guilty," Alcide said. "Something'll come along pretty soon that you'll feel guilty about. Save it up.

Don't worry about not feeling guilty. Something will happen soon for which you will feel guilty. Keep the feeling for then.

I don't want to live with the guilt of messing up someone's retirement fund.