Guilt Quotes - Page 17

• Diana knew it wouldn't be right, but then she told herself that things only looked wrong when there was someone to see you.

  Anna Godbersen

  Diana, Wrongdoing

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• Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

  Milan Kundera

  Daughter, Mother, Children

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• Do you know why this world is as bad as it is?... It is because people think only about their own business, and won't trouble themselves to stand up for the oppressed, nor bring the wrong-doers to light... My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.

  Anna Sewell

  Thinking, Light, People

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• Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone, While pain and guilt still linger here below, Blindness and numbness--these please me alone; Then do not wake me, keep your voices low.

  Michelangelo

  Pain, Inspiration, Sleep

  Michelangelo (2017). “Sonnets of Michelangelo”, p.78, Routledge

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• We carry on. We have ourselves and we carry on- in spite of our losses and mistakes and women, I think, have more than most. We are good secret-keepers. We can tie weights to out guilt and passions, and hatred and deceitfulness, and let them sink down, so that you'd never know they existed at all. But we know. I can count all mine.

  Susan Fletcher

  Mistake, Passion, Loss

  Susan Fletcher (2007). “Oystercatchers”, HarperCollins UK

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• How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

  Ian Mcewan

  Self, Rosary, Details

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• Guilt -- if there was any guilt -- spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed.

  Philip K. Dick

  Responsibility, World, Moments

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• Instead of relief or gratitude, more guilt washes over me. Andy's certainly not faultless - no one ever is in a marriage

  Emily Giffin

  Gratitude, Relief

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• Guilt is a tireless horse. Grief ages into sorrow, and sorrow is an enduring rider.

  Dean Koontz

  Horse, Grief, Sorrow

  Dean Koontz (2007). “The Darkest Evening of the Year: A Novel”, p.37, Bantam

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• All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares.

  Toni Morrison

  Beautiful, Dream, Pain

  Toni Morrison (2014). “The Bluest Eye”, p.161, Random House

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• We are on strike, we, the men of the mind. We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

  Ayn Rand

  Work, Men, Self

  Ayn Rand (2005). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.954, Penguin

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• Guilt is a good friend, isn't it? It will stand at your back when every other friend has abandoned you, and in the face of all reason it will stay by your side, and even when you tell it, "I am moving on now," it will say, "I shall never leave you; never." If only I could find a lover as faithful as guilt.

  Holly Lisle

  Moving, Good Friend, Your Side

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• Funny thing, your brain, how it always functions on one level or another. How, even stuck in some sort of subconcious limbo, it works your lungs, your muscle twitches, your heart, in fact, in symphony with your heart, allowing it to feel love. Pain. Jealousy. Guilt. I wonder if it’s the same for people, lost in comas. Is there really such a thing

  Ellen Hopkins

  Pain, Heart, Funny Things

  Ellen Hopkins (2012). “Ellen Hopkins: Crank Trilogy”, p.148, Simon and Schuster

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• I believe in me, in my view of the world. I believe in my responsibility for my own destiny, guilt for my own sins, merit for my own good deeds, determination of my own life. I don't believe in miracles, I believe in hard work.

  Philippa Gregory

  Determination, Believe, Responsibility

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• I loved them all the way one loves at any age -- if it's real at all -- obsessively, painfully, with wild exultation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them, I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world -- and in a way I suppose they were.

  May Sarton

  Real, Heart, Animal

  May Sarton (2014). “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel”, p.19, Open Road Media

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• Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy--a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer.

  Ayn Rand

  Happiness, Real, Escaping

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.212, Penguin

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• So much wanting and longing, clutching, desiring, passion and hatred and terrible need. Here, death was suitable, there was room for it, the grip of life's relentless urges slackened, replaced by this icy simplicity. This wasnt her death. It was his. That was the sad and honest truth. Though it would stay with her, it would be more like a black onyx heart on a silver chain, worn privately, under her clothes, close to her body, all her life. The guilt, the beauty, everything. It wasnt over, it had only begun. Well ok then, Okay.

  Janet Fitch

  Passion, Heart, Clothes

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• A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It's as if I've been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I've heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There's the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don't know where these feelings have come from, what I've done.

  Margaret Atwood

  Lying, Blood, Talking

  Margaret Atwood (1989). “Cat's Eye”, Bantam

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• Villains!' I shrieked. 'Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Heart, Tears, Deeds

  Edgar Allan Poe, Stuart Levine, Susan Levine (1976). “The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition”, p.262, University of Illinois Press

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• ...The men eyed her with the automatic mix of curiosity, lust, and aesthetic judgment they always gave young women, subject to object, the way you'd stare at an animal. She pretended not to notice. To remind them she was a person was too much effort. Objects bore no guilt.

  Janet Fitch

  Animal, Men, Effort

  Janet Fitch (2013). “Paint It Black”, p.22, Hachette UK

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• Truth is, I'm a good Catholic girl. The faith has always been elusive, but the guilt is intractable.

  Janet Evanovich

  Girl, Catholic, Truth Is

  Janet Evanovich (2009). “Plum Spooky”, p.18, Macmillan

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• I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.

  Alberto Manguel

  Book, Waiting, Feelings

  Alberto Manguel (2011). “The Library at Night”, p.237, Vintage Canada

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• I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

  P. D. James

  Commitment, Kitchen, Tables

  P. D. James (2010). “The Children of Men”, p.40, Vintage

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• The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

  Susan Sontag

  Inspiration, Writing, Recluse

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• When she can't bring me to heal with scolding, she bends me to shape with guilt.

  Libba Bray

  Family, Home, Shapes

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