guilt

Your thoughts can torture you-but not the dead. They've moved on.

Death will paint everything a different shade of remorse. You__l feel guilty that you__e still breathing. But you can__ stop.You__l feel guilty for wanting to laugh again. And it will be awful the first time that you do. You__l feel guilty for just about everything at first.And someday, at some point, you__l start to feel guilty . . . for forgetting to feel guilty.But of all Heaven__ lessons, guilt isn__ one of them. You don__ need to hold on to it. It doesn__ need to be a practice and it shouldn__ be your life. Heaven would never approve of your guilt.Because Heaven has no regrets.

She had dreams that shamed her in the morning, dreams where Ronan gave her a white powdered cake, yet spoke in Arin's voice. I made this for you, he said. Do you like it?The powder was so fine that she inhaled its sweetness, but always woke before she could taste.

Her free hand was clenched in a fist. I held still, waiting for her to say something, to tell me she should have never left me here, where her friends might look to me for help.Finally she looked at me. Her eyes were hard, but she'd let no tears fall. "This is where we blame those who are responsible, Cooper, she told me, her voice very soft. "The colemongers, and the bought Dogs at Tradesmen's kennel. We'll leave an offering for him with the Black God when all this is done, and we'll occupy ourselves with tearing these colemongers apart. all right? We put grief aside for now.

A selfish person can still love someone else, can't they? Even when they've hurt them and let them down.

Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.

Death was silence, loss, guilt. And anger. But life led that way, anyway. From birth, it was a slow, long march to the grave. Who said that? She couldn__ remember now. But it was true. They were born dying. If they were very lucky, the dying was called aging. They reached toward if as if they were satellites in unstable orbits. And then when they got there, they were just dead. One moment in time separated the living from the ghosts.

Innocence could be lost more than once after all.

Christmas is such a time of struggle anyway, crammed with busy and hurry and the expectation that you will be joyful, no matter what. Then, if you__e like me, when you just sit quietly, just be, and let yourself feel what you feel, the guilt creeps in. Because you__e alive and the world is big, and you should be feeling some freakin_ Christmas spirit.

Some thoughts should never be conceived. Some questions should never be asked, because they have no answer, and the questions themselves serve only to haunt with grinding guilt and second guessing.

I always welcomed the comforting cloak of night except for the times when I lost something in it.

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.

Pages burnt, memories buried, I wakeor think I'm awake. Or dreaming still?

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.

When it comes to the crunch, coming out is the greatest of all confessions. Nothing is more difficult to acknowledge. When we become ourselves we reach right back to the time when we were conceived out of our parents_ passion. We murder their lives. There can never be any forgiveness.

Self redemption is the first step to exoneration from guilt.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker's, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.

Guilt addresses an external action while shame attacks the internal character!" EL