Quotes About Guilt

They were too careful around me, as if I was breakable. It was like I was a prize cat they were cat-sitting: you'd take your own cat for granted, you'd be casual about it, but someone else's cat would be another story because if you lost that cat you would feel guilty about it in a completely different way.

But nothing I ever gave was good for you; it was like white bread to goldfish. They cram and cram, and it kills them, and they drift in the pool, belly-up, making stunned faces and playing on our guilt as if their own toxic gluttony was not their fault.

Mitch looks in her direction. He can't meet her eyes. It's as if she's semi-invisible, a kind of hovering blur.

What was the guilty thing?" says Anne-Marie. "What's Prospero done that's so terrible?" "Indeed, what?" Felix asks rhetorically. More of the cast have gathered around. "He doesn't tell us. It's one more puzzle in the play. But The Tempest is a play about a man producing a play—one that's come out of his own head, his 'fancies'—so maybe the fault for which he needs to be pardoned is the play itself.

a young woman in desperate financial straits, with no visible relations and no nest egg or trust fund or fallback. People would shake their heads — a shame but what could you do, and at least she had something of marketable value, namely her young ass, and therefore she wouldn't starve to death, and nobody had to feel guilty.

Young people are moving away from feeling guilty about sleeping with somebody to feeling guilty if they are *not* sleeping with someone.

You're like the thief who isn't the least bit sorry he stole, but is terribly, terribly sorry he's going to jail. - Rhett Butler

Influence is everything, and guilt or innocence merely an academic question.

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

A side benefit of the new and developing technologies is that soon we won't have to feel guilty about the suffering and denigration of the animals because we will have made them up.

Today, let's set our minds and hearts on feeling more thankful for what we are than guilty for what we're not. Let's cut the threads of guilt with grace.

I want to learn how to be more thankful for what I am, than guilty for what I'm not.

If I were ever to go mad it would be on Thanksgiving Day, that day of guilt and grace when the family hangs upon you like an ax over a sacrificial victim, like the oven's heat on that poor bird.

Poetry should be written the way adultery is committed: on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for. And then you come home, as if nothing ever happened.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.

I walk around feeling a sort of existential guilt all the time; and honestly for me this house is a way of feeling less guilty about the universe. - Julia Louis

Ever since I got married I've been thinking night and day about whose fault it was, and every time I think about it, out comes a new fault to eat up the old one; but always there's a fault left.

On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man.

Out, damned spot! out, I say! One: two: why, then 'tis time to do't. Hell is murky!

Guilt has no right to profit by the generosity of the guiltless.

She say guilt is a useless emotion. Oh, please, says Nancy. Guilt is what separates humans from animals.

when people wonder how I survived being accused of killing my mother, none of them realizes that watching her die was many, many times worse. And knowing I could have killed her was nothing compared to knowing I could not save her. And know I'd almost missed knowing her was far more frightening than Ed Best and his little army of shrunken suits.

Oh, Youth may listen patiently, While sad Experience tells her tale, But Doubt sits smiling in his eye, For ardent Hope will still prevail! He hears how feeble Pleasure dies, By guilt destroyed, and pain and woe; He turns to Hope—and she replies, "Believe it not-it is not so!

I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed, while somewhere out there my dearest friends are dropping from exhaustion or being knocked to the ground.