Quotes About Shame

I'm the last person who has any desire to instruct anybody in shame. That's no errand for me.

Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.

Shame is the turnkey that keeps our evil desires in jail.

It is not human to be without shame and without desire.

All beings desire pleasure, a surcease of need or want, and there is no shame in that.

If I had any dignity, that would have been humiliating.

There is even the dignity of vice.

The shame of living extends its tentacles around my dreams.

I am ashamed the law is such an ass.

Nobody would want their lowest moment to be filmed for the world to see.

Growing up, the main thing I was ashamed of was my voice. It is very effeminate.

It was odd. As a girl, Sophie would have shriveled with embarrassment at the way she was behaving. As an old woman, she did not mind what she did or said. She found that a great relief.

As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.

Blood in the water I sing, and one who shed it: deadliest hunger I sing, and one who fed it- weaving the ancient-most tale of the Sea's sending: singing the tragedy, singing the joy unending This is our shame- this is the whole Ocean's glory: this is the Song of the Twelve. Hark to the story! Hearken, and bring it to pass: swift lest the sorrow long ago laid to it's rest devour us tomarrow!

And my own feelings? Shame. For I had lied. Of course I loved books more than people. Of course I valued Jane Eyre over the anonymous stranger with his hand on the lever. Of course all of Shakespeare was worth more than a human life. Of course. Unlike Miss Winter, I had been ashamed to say so.

Guilt slithered through e like a poisonous snake.

I never learned hate at home or shame. I had to go to school for that.

How can the intensity of this shame be understood by those who have never experienced it? How can they understand the strength of the motivations produced by the desire to escape from it?

I have really sinned. I am going to pause now, and sit here on the mound repenting in deepest shame...

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

If you don't have the grace and wit to die early, you are forced to vanish, to hide as if in shame and apology.

And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope, swept by river wind? Is the memory thin and bitter and does it shame you with its fundamental untruth--all nuance and wishful silhouette? Or does the power of transcendence linger, the sense of an event that violates natural forces, something holy that throbs on the hot horizon, the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt?

Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war

I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.