Gena Showalter Quotes

I started to think about the assumptions we make that everyone we meet operates under the same moral code, and how betrayed we feel when that isn't the case.

Occasionally, chewing over some random letter writer's dilemma, I'll find myself imagining scenarios where the problem could be sidestepped by an innocent fib or series of evasive manoeuvres. Then, I slap myself on the wrist.

When honor and the Law no longer stand on the same side of the line, how do we choose[?]

More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.

It is absolutely impossible at the same time to be a man of understanding and not to be ashamed to gratify the body.

The law often permits what honor prohibits.

I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar.

I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.

There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?

Even as a junkie I stayed true [to vegetarianism] - 'I shall have heroin, but I shan't have a hamburger.' What a sexy little paradox.

I ought, or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.

We manage to swallow flesh, only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing we do.

He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

Sometimes you have to choose between a bunch of wrong choices and no right ones. You just have to choose which wrong choices feels the least wrong.

I know what I did to you was so wrong, but at the time it also felt so necessary to my survival. I don't know if those two things can both be true, but that's how it was.

But rules only work when everyone plays by them. What happens when someone doesn't, and the fallout bleeds right into his life? Whats stronger- the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

Most men only commit great crimes because of their scruples about petty ones.

Beyond all our actions stands the larger shadow: How are we to choose between what we have been taught to think right and something else which manifestly succeeds?

The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.

I believe I did what honor dictated and that belief sustains me, except for a slight desire to be dead which I'm sure will pass.

Page and I get offered everything: women, little boys, cocaine, the lot, to just go back and do that again. I don't think it would be a good idea at all. [But] I reserve judgment to change my mind in five years' time.

Science is important, but so is ethics, so is balancing life. To destroy life to save life - it's one of the real ethical dilemmas that we face.

I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.

It is a sin to write this.