Best 1275 quotes in «guilt quotes» category

I see you kneeling in church—stained only by colored windows

I should have seen it coming.” The words don’t surprise me, but they piss me off. I pull away and glare down at her. “Don’t you fucking dare, Nell Hawthorne. Don’t you dare put this on yourself. You should never have to see shit like this coming.” She backs away, stunned and afraid by the intensity I know is radiating off me. “Colton, I just meant he’s always shown—” “Stop. Just stop right there. Granted, you should’ve never gotten involved with a douchetard like him, but that’s no excuse for what he did.

I take it, though,...given the utter lack of change in your demeanor and nearly radiating I-just-slaughtered-a -bunch-of-infant-forest-animals guilt coming from your general direction...the exchange with your female friend went something a trifle short of fantastic.

It doesn't matter how deep you bury an incriminating letter in the trash, it's still there. It doesn't matter how far you push a body back into a tunnel, either. That's still there, too. Even if it's been destroyed, it's still there. You know this already. You'll have bodies stashed in tunnels of your own. Things you've done, mistakes you've made, secrets you hold - the guilt you carry for moments that stick out in your past like black stars in the firmament of your inner life. The outlier occurrences. The anomalies. The events you look back upon in disbelief, wondering how the hell they could have come to pass, and if they can be made to fit in a story you are prepared to own. But the truth is, you get where you're going not through the long, forgettable years of sticking to the path, but through the moments when you wander off it. It's the things that don't make sense that reveal who you are inside. The anomalies make you who you are. That realization will not make you feel any better about them. Time may help you turn a blind eye, but guilt is the stain that never goes away.

It doesn't matter how deep you bury an incriminating letter in the trash, it's still there. It doesn't matter how far you push a body back into a tunnel, either. That's still there, too. Even if it has been destroyed, it's still there. You know this already. You'll have bodies stashed in tunnels of your own. Things you've done, mistakes you've made, secrets you hold - the guilt you carry for moments that stick out in your past like black stars in the firmament of your inner life. The outlier occurrences. The anomalies. The events you look back upon in disbelief, wondering how the hell they could have come to pass, and if they can be made to fit in a story you are prepared to own. But the truth is you get where you're going not through the long forgettable years of sticking to the path, but through the moments when you wander off it. It's the things that don't make sense that reveal who you are inside. The anomalies make you who you are. That realization will not make you feel any better about them. Time may help you turn a blind eye, but guilt is the stain that never goes away.

It happened. It was awful. You aren't perfect. That's all there is. Don't confuse your grief with guilt." We stay in the silence and the loneliness of the otherwise empty dormitory for a few more minutes, and I try to let her words work themselves into me.

There is no client as scary as an innocent man." J. Michael Haller, Criminal Defense Attorney, Los Angeles, 1962.

I think most Christians hear these urgent calls to do more (or feel them internally already) and learn to live with a low-level guilt that comes from not doing enough. We know we can always pray more and give more and evangelize more, so we get used to living in a state of mild disappointment with ourselves.

It is important to recognize guilt as the temporary teacher it is.

It is my personal opinion that all survivors can go from victim to victor and live more than a survivor.

It is taken as a strong proof of a man's innocence that he should look you full in the face with a steadfast gaze when you look at him with suspicion plainly visible in your eyes; but would he not be the poorest villain if he shirked that encounter of glances when he knows full surely that he is in that moment put to the test? It is rather innocence whose eyelids drop when you peer too closely into its eyes, for innocence is appalled by the stern, accusing glances which it is unprepared to meet. Guilt stares you boldly in the face, for guilt is hardened and defiant, and has this one grand superiority over innocence-- that it is prepared for the worst.

I touched curiosity, I kissed sin, I felt regret, And I was forgiven. But life won't let me forget.

It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit’s joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false—it is impalpable—it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.

I took my real strength to be able to face childhood sexual abuse.

It is well for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace. The agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in indulging the excess of grief.

It's a parents part time job to have guilt.

It's a singular sort of pain, watching the most beautiful creature self-destruct because you weren't able to find the red wire.

It’s hard to comprehend the ache in your gut when you see things going wrong and can’t figure out how to fix them.

It seems The Adversary needs neither their guilt nor their request, but simply their return. In other words, since repentance is the process whereby guilt is turned into gratitude, He doesn’t mind if they skip a step and go directly to gratitude.

It’s important to determine your path towards healing, the one that works best for you, someone else path may not work for you.

It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader. Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party.

It's forbidden to bite a woman's arse. In the absence of a legal precedent, the Imams decided to apply human law to the guilty monkey, whoever it turned out to be. They narrowed it down to Bosco or Shin Bone. The victim was unable to distinguish one monkey from the other.

It’s highly discriminating to say which of the abuse is a more decisive than the other.

It's in your hands to transform your pain into victory.

It’s my right to take back control of my life because I am a Survivor!

It's not about people believing the story. It's about you knowing and holding it to be true.

It's okay for us to be angry. Be annoyed at the injustice. You own full rights to be upset before you recover.

It tugs at me, filling me with the kind of seasick nostalgia that can hit you in the gut when you find an old concert ticket in your purse or an old coin machine ring you got down at the boardwalk on a day when you went searching for mermaids in the surf with your best friend. That punch of nostalgia hits me now and I start to sink down on the sky-coloured quilt, feeling the nubby fabric under my fingers, familiar as the topography of my hand.

It took a strong you to live through the abuse and the secrets.

It took him almost a half hour to write a message of only five lines. It took yet another fifteen minutes to delete whatever might be construed as ambiguity, desperation, or references to a history that he no longer had access to. Finally, he took a deep breath and hit ‘send’.

It takes more courage to be yourself than to live in the prison of ego with feelings of guilt. It takes a lot more courage to be happy than to be unhappy.

It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

It was a stark choice: shoes or food; beauty or sustenance; the sensible or the self-indulgent. "I'll take the shoes," she said firmly.

It used to be that parents didn't have to be home. If a neighbor so I child misbehaving, it was considered appropriate for the neighbor to intervene. The parents would be grateful when they found out, and they would take the word of the neighbor if the child protested his innocence. Unmarried and divorced parents tend not to behave that way. Instead, they tend to try to be the good guy to their children.

It wasn’t some mysterious adverse personality trait that comprises of who I am, it unquestionably had a source - A cradle of years of unprocessed trauma owing to sexual, emotional, mental, verbal and physical ill-treatment.

It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.

It wasn't a sign of weakness to tell what happened to me. I feel guilt no longer, only regret. The other emotions are coming around too. How much further do I need to go? I'm not sure, but there is comfort in the fact that I am in the hands of expert guides, both in the doctor's office and at home with Sue.

It was the look on her face when she said it. And how much she meant it. It suddenly made everything seem like it really was. I felt terrible. Just terrible.

It would be logical for any group whose only sense of identity is the negative one of wickedness and oppression to dilute its wickedness by mixing with more virtuous groups. This is, upon reflection, exactly what celebrating diversity implies. James Carignan, a city councilor in Lewiston, Maine, encouraged the city to welcome refugees from the West African country of Togo, writing, “We are too homogeneous at present. We desperately need diversity.” He said the Togolese—of whom it was not known whether they were literate, spoke English, or were employable—“will bring us the diversity that is essential to our quest for excellence.” Likewise in Maine, long-serving state’s attorney James Tierney wrote of racial diversity in the state: “This is not a burden. This is essential.” An overly white population is a handicap. Gwynne Dyer, a London-based Canadian journalist, also believes whites must be leavened with non-whites in a process he calls “ethnic diversification.” He noted, however, that when Canada and Australia opened their borders to non-white immigration, they had to “do good by stealth” and not explain openly that the process would reduce whites to a minority: “Let the magic do its work, but don’t talk about it in front of the children. They’ll just get cross and spoil it all.” Mr. Dyer looked forward to the day when politicians could be more open about their intentions of thinning out whites. President Bill Clinton was open about it. In his 2000 State of the Union speech, he welcomed predictions that whites would become a minority by mid-century, saying, “this diversity can be our greatest strength.” In 2009, before a gathering of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, he again brought up forecasts that whites will become a minority, adding that “this is a very positive thing.” [...] Harvard University professor Robert Putnam says immigrants should not assimilate. “What we shouldn’t do is to say that they should be more like us,” he says. “We should construct a new us.” When Marty Markowitz became the new Brooklyn borough president in 2002, he took down the portrait of George Washington that had hung in the president’s office for many years. He said he would hang a picture of a black or a woman because Washington was an “old white man.” [...] In 2000, John Sharp, a former Texas comptroller and senator told the state Democratic Hispanic Caucus that whites must step aside and let Hispanics govern, “and if that means that some of us gringos are going to have to give up some life-long dreams, then we’ve got to do that.” When Robert Dornan of California was still in Congress, he welcomed the changing demographics of his Orange County district. “I want to see America stay a nation of immigrants,” he said. “And if we lose our Northern European stock—your coloring and mine, blue eyes and fair hair—tough!” Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times, appears happy to become a minority. He wrote this about Sonya Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings: “[T]his particular wise Latina, with the richness of her experiences, would far more often than not reach a better [judicial] conclusion than the individual white males she faced in that Senate hearing room. Even those viewers who watched the Sotomayor show for only a few minutes could see that her America is our future and theirs is the rapidly receding past.” It is impossible to imagine people of any other race speaking of themselves this way.

I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.

Look, I don't know who has been telling you over the years that you aren't worthy of love and happiness, but they're idiots. We all deserve it. And if people get hurt along the way, that's life. We've all been hurt. Doesn't that make love more crucial to our lives?

Living the good life as created beings depends on living within the limits and according to the truths of the human condition. Purity of heart and the capacity to channel desires toward personal self-mastery in holiness are part of the high calling of the Christian life. These remain necessities, despite the promises of a false humanism that claims that human nature has neither limits nor boundaries, being infinitely plastic and malleable -- a vain and counterproductive attempt to liberate humans from guilt.

Look innocent. Have hope.” “Okay.” “And remember…” “What?” “Even O.J. Simpson was acquitted.

Looks sure can be deceiving: not every ‘ugly’ person is a ‘bad’ person (or is guilty of whatever it is that they are accused of).

I've spent all the years since full of guilt and misery, even though I didn't remember it. I've let it run my thoughts, my plans, my whole life. But the experience doesn't own me. I own it. What I do with it is up to me, just like what Molly does with her death magic is up to her.

I was a coward. I've been a coward. So have you. We've both got blood on our hands. We're not the heroes who saved the world, we're the villains who survived it. I've made my peace with that. You should, too, because guilt is a weight you'll never swim away from.

I was worthy of healing my scars and so are you.

Lo!" said Percivale, "those I had slain were not put to silence. I heard their breath speak out of the lips of others; I saw their looks mock out of the eyes of others; the life that was gone from their bodies was but draughted to enliven fresh matter. In every ray of light, in every gust that blew, the life of the dead moved to confound me. Ah, Saint, the things they had uttered were black and heavy; I could not bear them.

Love and guilt are like ham and eggs. So many people enjoy them together, but there’s no rule saying you must have one with the other. They don’t even come from the same animal.

Love is a worthy motivation, although you see how quickly it can sour into guilt.