Audre Lorde Quotes

What is guilt? Guilt is the pledge drive constantly hammering in our heads that keeps us from fully enjoying the show. Guilt is the reason they put the articles in Playboy.

Guilt once harbored in the conscious breast, intimidates the brave, degrades the great.

Guilt is anger directed at ourselves.

Guilt starts as a feeling of failure.

Guilt is a rope that wears thin.

I think remorse ought to stop biting the consciences that feed it.

How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.

To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.

Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats out the very heart and substance of the metal.

I feel bad that I don't feel worse.

Conscience: something that feels terrible when everything else feels well.

I think it's a lot harder to forgive yourself for your own mistakes.

Everything is my fault when you're me. I don't know why.

People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That's not the idea at all.

Guilt's a terrible thing.

Guilt agonizes over trifles, ignores habitual wrongdoing.

Guilt has always its horrors and solicitudes; and, to make it yet more shameful and detestable, it is doomed often to stand in awe of those to whom nothing could give influence or weight but their power of betraying.

My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul.

Being guilty tends to engender feelings of guilt.

Our faults afflict us more than our good deeds console. Pain is ever uppermost in the conscience as in the heart.

But the guilt goes even deeper than that. It, too, is dust: Layers and layers of it have accumulated. Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all. I told on them. I was jealous. God forgive me, for I have sinned.

The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality. And I take responsibility for the entire problem. I am a deceiver and a liar. There's a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life.

Guilt is the most destructive of all emotions. It mourns what has been while playing no part in what may be, now or in the future.

People feel guilty. And guilt is stymieing. Guilt immobilizes. Guilt closes the air ducts and the veins, and makes people ignorant.

There are some things we should feel guilty about, but the guilt feelings should attach to the deed, not to the doer.