Quotes About Shame

You think of a criminal, and you already judge them for the crime, and you don't really see the human side of them. We all have our sides that we're not proud about.

I just am trans. That's just the way it is. I knew this as a child. But I was told that because I expressed femininity in a boy's body, I needed to be silent about it. To be ashamed. That led to isolation, which then made it easier for me to be prey to a predator in my own home.

A man that is ashamed of passions that are natural and reasonable is generally proud of those that are shameful and silly.

Rationalization is Resistance's right-hand man. Its job is to keep us from feeling the shame we would feel if we truly faced what cowards we are for not doing our work.

Warrior cultures (and warrior leaders) enlist shame, not only as a counter to fear but as a goad to honor. The warrior advancing into battle (or simply resolving to keep up the fight) is more afraid of disgrace in the eyes of his brothers than he is of the spears and lances of the enemy.

I was too ashamed of myself, of being a bad husband, a failure as a provider, of bailing out on my would-be novel after almost two years of being supported by my loving wife, that I could no longer stand her seeing me the way I was.

For women, the cruelest state is to be denied; for men it's to be stricken with shame

Our experience of our body has been immersed in shame. Waking to the sacredness of the female body will cause a woman to "enter into" her body in a new way, be at home in it, honor it, nurture it, listen to it, delight in its sensual music. She will experience her female flesh as beautiful and holy, as a vessel of the sacred. She will live from her gut and feet and hands and instincts and not entirely in her head.

Her forbidden bath all those months ago still hung leaden between us, though Handful didn't seem the least bit ashamed by my discovery of it. Rather the opposite, she was like someone who'd risen to her full measure.

When a girl is sexually abused, layers of secrecy and shame are added to her self-blame. The incestuous aggressor always projects the guilt for his crime onto the child he is molesting. The girl then learns to see herself as dirty and worthless. Having accepted humiliation, and exploitation as the conditions of survival during childhood, the girl is likely to reenact that same abuser/victim relationship with men in her adult life.

The incest victim's need for self-punishment often leads her into self-abusive behaviors like alcoholism, drug abuse, or prostitution.

Whereas rape victims' self blaming has often been misunderstood as merely a self-destructive response to rape, arising out of low self-esteem, feelings of shame, or female masochism, and fueled by society's desire to blame the victim, it can also be seen as an adaptive survival strategy, if the victim has no other way of gaining control.

That I'd get over being publicly humiliated? That your running away wouldn't be the topic of conversation around town for months?" She lowered her head. She'd pulled her long

Like other diseases that arouse feelings of shame, AIDS is often a secret, but not from the patient. A cancer diagnosis was frequently concealed from patients by their families; an AIDS diagnosis is at least as often concealed from their families by patients.

So, on top of the betrayal, I got to feel ashamed. I got to hate myself, when the rage of Medea would have served me better; but I was ever a stranger to rage.

He said no one has a right to overrule a woman's choice. He also said it's unconscionable that this process took as long as it did, and it's shameful that every court in the system touched this case and still didn't apply the law. Not only that, the judge who originally granted it was censured.

When Darla told her parents she was pregnant, they made her leave. They were old-school. Said they couldn't handle the shame.

Sometimes the boy wished they could sit and that words would flow. But when they sat, eyes would turn shyly away. Father and son usually fell silent. It was ancient inherited shame of fathers and sons.

Shameful, wouldn't you

No one can disgrace us but ourselves.

Upon discovering what Fred had done, his mother grabbed him and stripped his clothes off. She stuck his butt out the window and yelled at the top of her voice, "Everyone in the neighborhood come quickly and see Freddie's bare ass!" That would be the first of many times during Fred Levin's life that he would bare his backside for the world to see.

People say, I don't know how she lives with herself, but every single one of them was living with their own worst thing, just fine. No one walks around holding their ugliest sin in the palm of their hand, staring at it.

As time passed, events became mutable. People justified their actions, and the more shame they felt about a memory, the more they chewed it over, fretting and defending and editing, until they could live with it.

Her whole body sang with a sick gladness that this was any child but hers. It was as immediate and involuntary as her heartbeat, and in her next breath, shame crept in. Not Shelby, thank God, thank God, but this girl was someone's.