Quotes About Responsibility

If you want to feel sorry for yourself," Mary continues, "then do it in a way that isn't going to destroy other people's lives.

Doesn't it count for anything if Josef wishes he hadn't done it?" Leo looks at me. "What counts," he says, "is that he did."  Ã¢â'¬Â¢

Now I know: adulthood is a line drawn in the sand. At some point, your child will be standing on the other side.

All mothers worry, but Black mothers, we have to worry a little bit more. "Even walking can be dangerous. Just being can be dangerous, if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something goes wrong. Do you think it's your fault—that if you'd tried better, or worked harder, it wouldn't have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance?

I glance at the house, dark and empty. Am I my sister's keeper? I say. Then I grin at her. If you feel like waiting, you can come up and see my etchings.

Children didn't make their own mistakes. They plunged into the pits they'd been led to by their parents.

If you don't want someone to change your life for you, you've got to change it yourself.

Children are the anchors of a mother's life. —SOPHOCLES, Phaedra

If you take away anything from this novel, I hope it is an awareness of the cognitive and emotional intelligence of these beautiful animals—and the understanding that it is up to all of us to protect them.

There's really no such thing as a right or wrong choice. We don't make decisions. Out decisions make us.

I'm screwed, Eric repeats, and shakes his head. I have to go. Take care of her, okay? He gives Delia to me as if she were a jewel to be smuggled, a prayer to be whispered between heretics. A pawn. Eric is halfway across the parking lot by the time I answer. I always do, I say.

Je suis devenu pompier parce que je voulais sauver des gens. Mais j'aurais dû être plus précis. J'aurais dû citer des noms.

Some feel that because they lived, it's their responsibility to tell the world what happened, so it won't happen again, and so people won't forget. Others believe that the only way to go on with the rest of our lives is to act as if it never happened.

Mayflies have the shortest life span on earth. Like, twenty-four hours. Wouldn't you feel terrible if you caused an even more untimely death?

Todo el mundo piensa que se cometen errores cuando se es joven—le dijo la jueza a Lacy—. Pero no creo que cometamos menos cuando somos adultos.

In Judaism, that's called teshuvah. It means 'turning away from evil.' It's not a one-time deal, either. It's a course of action. A single act of repentance is something that makes the person who committed the evil feel better, but not the person against whom evil was committed.

It struck her that dispensing justice was really more about being present and engaged than anything else—unlike

Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing." "What's the difference?" "The best thing is what you think should be done. The rightest thing is what needs to be done—when you think not just of you and how you feel, but also the extra stuff—who else is involved, and what's happened before, and what the rules say.

It is pitch dark and raining when I leave Josef's house, shaking beneath the responsibility of his confessions. What I want

Some feel that because they lived, it's their responsibility to tell the world what happened, so it won't happen again, and so people won't forget. Others believe that the only way to go on with the rest of their lives is to act as if it never happened.

Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that's because it's all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on.

The fundamental sense of freedom involves something far larger than simply being left alone to follow one's own best self-interest. The idea of freedom is considerably more than private value. Individual autonomy is nested within a complex of obligations individuals have toward one another. Obligations are required for freedom to be moral. Far from being individualistic, freedom is an essential social idea. (Schwarz 2005:4)

If I live my life independently of my brother, and he destroys himself as a result of my independence, is there blood on my hands? Am I my brother's enabler?