William Butler Yeats Quotes

If you really kill, you don't want to talk about it.

Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.

I'm not proud of killing, of being responsible for the death of a single person. I never will be.

To have the truth in your possession you can be found guilty, sentenced to death.

I've read and traveled a lot in the Middle East, and I built on eyewitness accounts of horrific executions that would shape a boy's character and beliefs if he watched his father die that way. These are the stuff of which nightmares are made.

This is dying with me. I'm not saying it even if I'm tied to a tree and being stabbed. I assume all the civilian and criminal responsibility

Merciful death. How you love your precious guilt

Do you see the irony at all, Tristan?’ I stare at him and shake my head. He seems determined not to speak again until I do. ‘What irony?’ I ask eventually, the words tumbling out in a hurried heap. ‘That I am to be shot as a coward while you get to live as one.

I was a coward. I went to the war.

O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!

The day of my arrest I was first put in a room where there were already several other prisoners, most of them Arabs. They laughed when they saw me. Then they asked what I was in for. I said I'd killed an Arab and they were all silent

If ambitious fantasies make people blush, and sexual fantasies make people blush and feel guilty, fantasies of violence and death may make people blush and feel guilty-and frightened too.

I was a coward on instinct.

Far better than emasculation would be the bravery of those who use physical force. Far better than cowardice would be meeting one's death fighting.

The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.

Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. It seems to hammer you into the ground. It drives you deeper and deeper into your own guilt. It makes the voices inside your head accuse you more viciously than any outside voices ever could.

Caroline Trent hadn't meant to shoot Percival Prewitt, but she had, and now he was dead. Or at least she thought he was dead.

I have sinned terribly, and I do not know what punishment awaits me.

No argument, no matter how convincing, will give courage to a coward

You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.

As a teenager in Brooklyn Quentin had often imagined himself engaged in martial heroics, but after this he knew, as a cold immutable fact, that he would do anything necessary, sacrificing whatever or whomever he had to, to avoid risking exposure to physical violence. Shame never came into it. He embraced his new identity as a coward. He would run in the other direction. He would lie down and cry and put his arms over his head or play dead. It didn't matter what he had to do, he would do it and be glad.