#guilt

For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling "vaguely guilty. ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#mothers #neglect #old-age #parents #sentimentality

And that for every negative event or coincidence that has happened since, imagining that you triggered them, that you made them happen makes you feel like you possess a degree of control that you don't have. ↗

— Michelle Hodkin

#psychosis #imagination

I had concluded when I was the prosecutor that I would vote against the death penalty if I were in the legislature but that I could ask for it when I was satisfied as to guilt. ↗

— Janet Reno

#ask #concluded #could #death #death penalty

Sometimes I just want to paint the words "It's my fault" across my forehead to save people the time of being pissed off at me. ↗

— Christina Westover

#anger #blame #burn #christina-westover #enemies

God never estimates what we give from impulse. We are given credit for what we determine in our hearts to give; for the giving that is governed by a fixed determination. The Spirit of God revolutionises our philanthropic instincts. Much of our philanthropy is simply the impulse to save ourselves an uncomfortable feeling. The Spirit of God alters all that. As saints our attitude towards giving is that we give for Jesus Christ’s sake, and from no other motive. ↗

— Oswald Chambers

#giving #guilt #attitude

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#love #motherhood #change

It has always seemed that a fear of judgment is the mark of guilt and the burden of insecurity. ↗

— Criss Jami

#being-strong #burden #discernment #fear #guilt

The police seemed to think I killed her, which is crazy, because I loved her like a thousand drops of blood dripping down a dagger. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#dagger #death #framed #guilt #guilty

I won't cry. When the guilt is this heavy, you can't. It just settles and stays with you, and it's cold. ↗

— Bethany Griffin

#guilt #death

Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth) ’ Humbly to express A penitential loneliness. ↗

— Thomas de Quincey

#guilt #human #thomas-de-quincey #family