Quotes About Shame

Rebekka's understanding of God was faint, except as a larger kind of king, but she quieted the shame of insufficient devotion by assuming that He could be no grander nor better than the imagination of the believer. Shallow believers preferred a shallow god. The timid enjoyed a rampaging avenging god.

Wasn't there a tribe in Africa that lashed the dead body to the back of the one who had murdered it? That would certainly be justice—to carry the rotting corpse around as a physical burden as well as public shame and damnation.

Like Twyla, Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless. And one of the ethical complexities of "Recitatif" is the uncomfortable fact that even as Twyla and Roberta fight to assert their own identities—the fact they are both "somebody"—they simultaneously cast others into the role of nobodies.

When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for refuge. The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.

Ashamed of the insults that were being heaped on our friend, we just sat there: I picked toe jam, Frieda cleaned her fingernails with her teeth, and Pecola finger-traced some scars on her knee—her head cocked to one side.

The dark ending does not cancel out the brightness of the middle. Your day of greatest joy cannot be dimmed by any shame.

Anything you got to do with your own kind in secret, something's wrong with it. You feel bad about it inside.

Take humiliation: what if we treated it as an economic cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to 'quantify' the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens as a condition of receiving the mere necessities of life?

It is, quite simply, humiliating.

I've been grasping at nothing, running in circles, trying desperately to fill the emptiness inside with nothing but air. If I think about it too much, I feel shame, so much shame. So I don't.

Depicting yourself as a whole person on the page doesn't only mean recognizing your role in a bad situation. It means being emotionally authentic. It means showing all of yourself: the shameful parts, the embarrassing parts, the parts that you might regret or that you wish weren't true.

Because that's what secrets are about—shame. Shame, along with the belief that keeping a secret will protect you or someone else, comes from the idea that there is some part of us so monstrous, so terrible, so inhuman, that it must not be known.

He has always been the kid who cries too easily and laughs too easily, the kid who begins giggling in church for no reason at all, who blinks hotly in shame and frustration whenever he misses a question in class, living in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes.

Istnieje ca?e mnóstwo uczu?: mi?o??, nienawi??, podekscytowanie, zak?opotanie, strach, gniew, po??danie, poczucie winy, wstyd, wyrzuty sumienia, ?al... I ?adnego z nich nie potrafimy kontrolowa?.

The person who is a defeated perfectionist generally has a conscience that's way too big. So big, in fact, that it magnifies shortcomings and failures and won't let its owner forget sins or imaginary sins of years ago, even though they have long since been repented of or paid for.

People always ask me if I hate the nuns. Do I make my movies extra dirty to piss them off? I always say no, that's not the point. To a Catholic, a movie is only dirty if it makes you want to have sex more. If it makes you feel sick, disgusted, ashamed of your own body, then it's not a dirty movie at all. It's a Catholic movie. And I make very Catholic movies.

Everything breaks down but desire. And because we are old, doctors try to shame that out of us. Young punks! Lose one's youth, and doctors take it as axiomatic that you've lost your mind, your balls.

I'm tired of feeling ashamed. About my foot.

My own ignorance shames me.

Jemubhai looked at his father, a barely educated man venturing where he should not be, and the love in Jemubhai's heart mingled with pity, the pity with shame.

You cannot silence me or the millions of women who have gotten off the sidelines to speak out about the unfitness and shame you have brought to the Oval Office.

When guilty shame wears a mask of curiosity, men are turned inside out, becoming strangers to themselves.

The hangman is a disgrace to any civilized country.

Don't you feel shame? I thought scum like you could at least feel shame