Shame quotations

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◆ I come home that morning, after I been fired, and stood outside my house with my new work shoes on. The shoes my mama paid a month's worth a light bill for. I guess that's when I understood what shame was and the color of it too. Shame ain't black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it.

- Kathryn Stockett99

◆ Once they know they've got a hold of your shame, they can shake it out and hold it up for the all world to see. And you become less than it. You become something disgusting.

- Kirsty Eagar99

◆ Does a rake deserve to possess anything of worth, since he chases everything in skirts and then imagines he can successfully hide his shame by slandering [women in general]?

- Christine de Pizan99

◆ I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.

- Kurt Vonnegut99

◆ Shame is always easier to handle if you have someone to share it with.

- Craig Thompson99

◆ Like all men who look this good, Frank has no interest in women.

- Dennis Sharpe99

◆ We cannot grow when we are in shame, and we can't use shame to change ourselves or others.

- Brené Brown99

◆ Creativity is the highest form of intelligence. Over time, after developing a more advanced creative brain, I started feeling that my college education was more so something to be ashamed of rather than something to be proud of.

- Criss Jami99

◆ Abuse manipulates and twists a child's natural sense of trust and love. Her innocent feelings are belittled or mocked and she learns to ignore her feelings. She can't afford to feel the full range of feelings in her body while she's being abused—pain, outrage, hate, vengeance, confusion, arousal. So she short-circuits them and goes numb. For many children, any expression of feelings, even a single tear, is cause for more severe abuse. Again, the only recourse is to shut down. Feelings go underground.

- Laura Davis99

◆ Shame was an emotion he had abandoned years earlier. Addicts know no shame. You disgrace yourself so many times you become immune to it.

- John Grisham99

◆ Among the problems with shame was that it in fact did not make you shorter or quieter or less visible. You just felt like you were.

- J.R. Ward99

◆ You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.

- David Mamet99

◆ I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.

- Judy Collins99

◆ You see, this happened a few months ago, but it's still going on right now, and it ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love.

- Raymond Carver99

◆ Every child that receives life advice should keep in mind that in every parent's past, there's leftover booze and contraceptives.

- Bauvard99