guilt

Here, in Lorrain's poisoned little jewel of a tale (__he Man Who Made Wax Heads_) the consummate achievement of decadent art is caught in miniature. The genius of the artist entangles perpetrators and victims in a sticky web of perverse delights, in which exploitation becomes collusion, the ripples of guilt spread outward, and the real criminal slips away. In the end, responsibility is lodged firmly with the consumer, forced _ he must confess _ by his own perverse desires, to buy into the values of this particularly black market.

Solitude is an interesting companion. It is both enemy and friend, comforter and tormentor. I spent a lot of time in Dun Cinzci's meat locker trying to decide which. Fortunately, when I tired of solitude, I had guilt to keep me company. Guilt is an even more interesting acquaintance than solitude, let me tell you. Solitude is a harsh but essentially benign attendant. Guilt, on the other hand, is a living, breathing creature, cruel and remorseless. It eats you from the inside out; devours what little hope you have left. It feeds on you, growing stronger with every accursed replayed memory, every useless recrimination." ~ Cayal, The Immortal Prince

The scene is most beautiful without people in it. People just screw things up. Forget the whole thing, the world, all the living people, I tell myself, and it has a ring of truth to it. The dead are better, aren't they? The dead don't betray or harm. They've already done all they can do. I can't figure out what people mean or who they are or whether they can be trusted, so, forget them. Don't even try anymore. For now at least, forget the living.

The summer I turned eleven, I found out that ghosts are real. Guess it's hard to rest nice and easy in your coffin if you got stuff on your mind. Your soul stays chained to earth instead of zipping up to heaven to sing in one of the angel choirs. Sometimes ghosts show up in the msot peculiar places. Sometimes ghosts fool you. Then you are those ghosts that hang around because we have unfinished business. Business that sinks like old crawfish left in a bucket for a week. That's some nasty smell let me tell you. But the most important thing I learned is that ghosts can help you spill your guts before guilt eats you up and leaves a hole that can't ever be fixed no matter how many patches you try to steam iron across it.

And the looks on the faces of my countrymenpassive heads bent arms at their trousers everyone guilty of not being their best of not earning their daily bread the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.

The Shrink always warned me that carriers stay wracked with lifelong guilt. It's not an uplifting thing having turned lovers into monsters. We feel bad that we haven't turned into monsters ourselves--survivor's guilt, that's called. And we feel a bit stupid that we didn't notice our own symptoms earlier. I mean, I'd been sort of wondering why the Atkins diet was giving me night vision. But that hadn't seemed like something to worry about...

The interruption did nothing but earn her a similar slap, as I__ sure she knew it would. Sometimes I wondered if my mother spoke up at the wrong time on purpose. As often as we endured my father__ abuse, she had to be aware that it wouldn__ save me from a beating but simply earn her one as well. Or was it that sharing my fate made her feel less guilt-ridden about those things that happened to me?

Vultures pick the meat clean off a bone. Guilt eats at the marrow, leaving a man hollow.

Consider guilt like a street sign that warns of rough roads ahead if you don__ make a u-turn.

This feeling of guilt is your conscience calling your attention to the higher road, and your heart wishing you had taken it.

If all of our sins, bad habits, and poor choices were permanently inked into our skin like tattoos, we would all dress quite modestly.

A pang of guilt, like a blaring siren, should never be ignored.

A sin confessed, a guilt cleared by grace.

When I touched that boy, I felt something. Something awful. Something I can__ describe.___e all felt it,_ Nick said.__ou may have felt it, but I caused it._ Then both his eyes seemed to go far away. __omething changed out there. I don__ know what it was, but something in the world changed because that kid didn__ deserve what I did to him__nd the powers that be know that I did it._ Nick watched as a tear fell from his Everlost eye and disappeared through the living world table.__hat if,_ said Nick, not even sure what he was going to say yet, __hat if you were that kid and you were told you could change the world, but you would have to sacrifice yourself to do it?__larence chuckled at the thought. __ believe that question was already asked a long time ago, and that creepy kid did not look anything like Jesus to me.___ut you do think that something changed. . . .___ don__ know whether it__ good or bad.___hat if it__ neither?_ suggested Nick. __hat if we get to make it one or the other?

They are an American Delegation who are doing a tour of the region to apologize for the crusades', said Arafat. Then he, and his guest, burst out laughing. They both knew that America had little or no involvement in the wars of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. But Arafat, at any rate, was happy to indulge the affliction of anyone who believed they had and use it to his own political advantage.

For those constantly full of joy, they sometimes feel a little guilty for always feeling so good. That guilt is compassion: it flies in with an attempt to share one's joy with others who do not have it.

She looks at the swings, and I can see she__ imagining what they__ look like if the kids weren__ there. The guilt of this holds her down momentarily. It appears to be there constantly. Never far away, despite her love for them.I realize that nothing belongs to her anymore and she belongs to everything.

...the gospel has an answer to both pride and guilt.