guilt

Guilt can weigh you down; like being bound in lead chains in a deep murky lake, making you spend the rest of your life gasping for air.

I remember as a child of eight being told by a young friend that I had killed Christ. That was news to me. It's a common experience for the Jewish young. Should later generations of Germans be burdened with the guilt arising from the profound inhumanity of their ancestors? Revenge may be sweet, but guilt is non-transferable. Still, hatreds survive with the persistence of cockroaches.

Guilt is a useless feeling. It's never enough to make you change direction--only enough to make you useless.

Guilt rarely listens to reason ...

All my life I have felt events to be the result of my own sins.

Think about what I said, Kat. You have nothing to prove.___ don__?___o,_ I said, and I__ say it a thousand times.But I knew screaming it from the top of Seneca Rocks wasn__ going to change how she felt.

Fuck 'em. Call it whatever you want. Maybe it's just two people clinging to each other to stay alive. Maybe sometimes that's all love gets to be. And, maybe, if they hold onto each other long enough . . . maybe something good finally happens.

We see our sins reflected everywhere: in the pallor of our intimates_ faces, in the scratching of tree branches against windows, in the strange movements of everyday objects. These may be messages from God or tricks of the eye, but in neither case are we permitted to ignore them.

Conscience is what makes a boy tell his mother before his sister does.

Your job today is to pass gas. You do that and we can start feeding you liquids. No fart, no food.

The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.

Behjet eased the horse forward again. "The harvest is failing. There will be no crop at all if this rain doesn't stop - not even hay."The rain. The rain she'd been so grateful for, the rain that concealed the warping of her shadow. It was going to kill people.

We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help.

We are not punished for our sins, we are punished by them. We can't live with guilt for the whole of our lives..

I couldn't begin to tell you what terrible trigger for such insanity lies deep in my sub-conscious. Though no doubt some would say that, indeed, it may be some demon of conscience. A deeply buried guilt for some unforgivable depravity. Then again, perhaps not.

But guilt isn't smart. It isn't logical. It doesn't only live in the places it belongs.

Or maybe, he thought, returning to the boxes, it was part of being Catholic--you were made to feel guilty about everything

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.