J. D. Salinger Quotes

I'm the one who has to look in the mirror, and after a while it begins to eat at you.

It's a shame I have to hurt people. I'm a nice guy.

Guilt isn't always a rational thing, Clio realized. Guilt is a weight that will crush you whether you deserve it or not.

Shame weighs a lot more than flesh and bone.

But when you kill someone you love, the hard part is never over. It just gets easier to distract yourself from what you've done.

You can't run away from yourself

Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

My soul is my great asset and my great misfortune.

The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay.

I lost my moral compass and I have done terrible things that I very much regret.

There's so much guilt there attached to having a perfectly good life.

All the seven deadly sins are man's true nature. To be greedy. To be hateful. To have lust. Of course, you have to control them, but if you're made to feel guilty for being human, then you're going to be trapped in a never-ending sin-and-repent cycle that you can't escape from.

Every guilty person is his own hangman.

All honor's wounds are self-inflicted.

I am not a prisoner of conscious, but people try to make me one sometimes. It is both a gift and a curse. It's a high honour but can create limitations - I have to be fluid.

There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.

Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself.

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.

For me, 'The Kite Runner' became about a guy who's emotionally shut down because he hasn't confronted his past.

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.

I walk around feeling a sort of existential guilt all the time; and honestly for me this house is a way of feeling less guilty about the universe.

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

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.

I hate myself for loving you and the weakness that it showed. You were just a painted face on a trip down to suicide road.

…I hate myself for not being able to go downstairs naturally and seek comfort in numbers. I hate myself for having to sit here and be torn between I know not what within me.