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Quotes About Shame

I know she's looking at me, the lopsided mouth smiling a little, the face closed and defiant. There is the same shame, the sick feeling in my body, the same knowledge of my own wrongness, awkwardness, weakness; the same wish to be loved; the same loneliness; the same fear. But these are not my own emotions any more. They are Cordelia's; as they always were.
~ Margaret Atwood
Eu gostaria de não ter vergonha. Gostaria de ser sem vergonha. Gostaria de ser ignorante. Então eu não saberia o quanto era ignorante.
~ Margaret Atwood
Illness had an element of shame to it; no one wanted to be contaminated by the illness of another. So the father of Oryx was pitied, but also blamed and shunned. His wife tended him with silent resentment.
~ Margaret Atwood
She's just jealous, people say, as if jealousy is something minor. But it's not, it's the worst, it's the worst feeling there is—incoherent and confused and shameful, and at the same time self-righteous and focused and hard as glass, like the view through a telescope. A feeling of total concentration, but total powerlessness. Which must be why it inspires so much murder: killing is the ultimate control.
~ Margaret Atwood
I had not been exposed to these kinds of situations, so this event was not trivial to me. Instead it was horrifying. It was also shameful: when a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied.
~ Margaret Atwood
There must be a certain freedom in not having a good name to lose.
~ Margaret Atwood
Although I'm afraid of this idea and ashamed of it, and although in the daytime I find it melodramatic and ludicrous and refuse to believe in it, I also cherish it. It's like the secret bottle stashed away by alcoholics: I may have no desire to use it, right now, but I feel more secure knowing it's there. It's a fallback, it's a vice, it's an exit. It's a weapon.
~ Margaret Atwood
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.
~ Margaret Atwood
Gaul was brought to shame by Caesar; By King Nicomedes, he. Here comes Caesar, wreathed in triumph For his Gallic victory! Nicomedes wears no laurels, Though the greatest of the three.
~ Margaret George
you didn't do these things, the other matrons talked about you and then your reputation was ruined and your family disgraced.
~ Margaret Mitchell
I don't think I'd feel any more violated if he'd stripped me bare. I might as well have lain down before him openly exposing all my flaws and my fears, inviting him to psychoanalyze me.
~ Siobhan Davis, Finding Kyler
For the first time, I am ashamed to be a German.
~ Wilhelm II
For a long time I was ashamed of the way I lived. Did I reform, you ask? No. I'm not ashamed anymore.
~ Mae West
One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.
~ Louis Kronenberger
We wouldn't pay to rent and watch the same painful movie two hundred fifty times, but somehow we let our mind replay a bad memory over and over, each time experiencing the same distress and shame.
~ Jan Chozen Bays
My doctor is nice; every time I see him, I'm ashamed of what I think of doctors in general.
~ Mignon McLaughlin
Reading, to most people, means an ashamed way of killing time disguised under a dignified name
~ Ernest Dimnet
I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.
~ Jacques Derrida
I hid my wounds because I was ashamed...but now I know that I was also afraid of being reduced..
~ Anna Quindlen
And now I have a question for you. 'Do you also put clothes on the flowers you've picked and refuse to talk about their delicate parts?' I don't think there's a very big difference between people and nature, and since we're also a part of nature, why should we be ashamed of the way nature made us?
~ Anne Frank
I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I'd remember that wonderful line of Blake's- that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love- and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: Thank you.
~ Anne Lamott
I sat down in the sand, breathless with shame and failure. God, I thought, some defender of the weak. Some freedom fighter: Joan of Arc in sunscreen.
~ Anne Lamott
Thanks' is a huge mind-shift, from thinking that God wants our happy chatter and a public demonstration and is deeply interested in our opinions of the people we hate, to feeling quiet gratitude, humbly and amazingly, without shame at having been so blessed.
~ Anne Lamott
I was raised in a culture that promotes this competitiveness, this insatiability, this fantasy of needing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and then, in the next breath, shames you for any feelings of longing or envy or fear that it will always be someone else's turn. I was only doing what I had been groomed to do.
~ Anne Lamott