Quotes about shame

Within that single heart surges mighty shame, and madness mingled with grief, and love stung by fury, and the consciousness of worth.

Shame is a distinct feeling. I couldn’t look at my hands around the coffee cup or hear my own laments without feeling appalled, wanting desperately to fall silent, grow smaller. More than that, I was uncomfortably conscious of my whole body, from the awkward way that the shafts of my hair were thrusting out of my scalp to my feet, which felt dirty as well as cold. Everywhere, I seemed to feel my skin from the inside, as if it now stood away from my flesh, separated by a millimeter of mortified space.

“You’re an interesting case,” she said.

There is really no end to life’s little humiliations, Quentin reflected.

Shame tells us that we are bad, which itself is an incredibly terrible feeling. But Systemic Shame teaches that entire groups of people are bad, and that through our choices and our identities, we constantly signal to other people whether we belong to a redeemable group or to an innately wicked one.

When a marginalized person holds themselves personally responsible for solving the problem of their own oppression, Systemic Shame is the overwhelmed, hopeless feeling that results.

In my experience, being a masked Autistic is eerily similar to being in the closet about being gay or trans. It's a painful state of self-loathing and denial that warps your inner experience. Though it often feels like being "crazy," it's not actually an internal neurosis. It's caused by society's repeated, often violent insistence you are not who you say you are, and that any evidence to the contrary is shameful.

By happily delving into our special interests and reveling in our Autistic capacity to hyperfocus, we can help retrain our brains to see our neurotype as a source of beauty rather than a mark of shame.

The flip side of innocence is shame.

The worst thing about shame is that we imagine we are the only ones to experience it.

I am endowed by shame's vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame.

"The thing to do with embarrassment," he told the young American couple who seemed determined to engage him, "is work it all the way to humiliation."

Like young men from the dawn of time, I decided to choose the risk of death over certain humiliation.