Colson Whitehead Quotes

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

Some of my instincts are reprehensible.

God forgive me if I do wrong in following with ardor the strongest instincts of my nature.

I was being called to surrender the very citadel of my self. I was completely in the dark. I did not really know what repentance was or what I was required to repent of. It was indeed the turning point of my life.

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.

I had often sought for the peace there is in Christ, but I could not seem to find the freedom I desired. A terrible sadness rested on my heart. I could not think of anything I had done to cause me to feel sad; but it seemed to me that I was not good enough to enter Heaven, that such a thing would be altogether too much for me to expect.

The darkest moments for me weren't necessarily winding up in the hospital or anything like that. It was those quiet moments alone when I just hated the person I had become.

He wished he could relieve himself of his doubts and guilts half as easily.

When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.

Having got into bed and turned out the light, I quietly burst into tears because I am not a good person. As they came and went for some minutes, I was concerned with the words following 'because' in the previous sentence, rewriting them over and over in my head until they seemed to be as close to the truth as it was possible for me to make them.

What is this self-inside us, this silent observer, severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us, and urge us onto futile activity, and in the end, judge us still more severely for the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?

You see, I needed to go to Hell.

Desires going before conversion are not such as can calm a storming conscience.

The most miserable pettifogging in the world is that of a man in the court of his own consciences.

If I cried me a river of all my confessions, would I drown in my shallow regret?

She wondered again about her inclination to wish for things that made her so deeply unhappy.

I think I'll be going to Heaven, because I had good intentions. But my actions are another thing.

If anyone has a conscience it's generally a guilty one.

I too have my own demons, and I have struggled. I've made my own mistakes, and I'm not proud of them.

Somewhere deep down there's a decent man in me, he just can't be found.

Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse.

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

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

There have been times that I've wept as I've gone from city to city and I've seen how far people have wandered from God.

There's a lot of reasons you can think of to say why you act, but I can only say that it just felt good. At the same time, it felt really painful. It's still troubling and stressful to me.