David Sedaris Quotes

When I think I've made an error, it can cause me a sleepless night. But that only happens rarely.

I'm a bit of a worrier, to an extreme. I'll crack a joke, then worry if I've offended someone - even when they're laughing. I have a guilt complex, always worrying.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.

At work, you think of the children you have left at home. At home, you think of the work you've left unfinished. Such a struggle is unleashed within yourself. Your heart is rent.

The worm of paranoia begins to eat into even the hardest adversary.

Rational anxiety is when you're aware of the source of your anxiety. Like, if I have to host an award show or talk to millions of people on the radio, I'm going to feel anxious, and I know why. Irrational anxiety is when I'm leaving CVS, and there's a car behind me, and I'm wondering if he's following me home.

So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.

Blushing, palpitations, a bad conscience--this is what you get if you haven't sinned.

Is it guilty in here or is it just me?

Anxiety and conscience are a powerful pair of dynamos. Between them, they have ensured that I shall work hard, but they cannot ensure that one shall work at anything worthwhile.

Guilt, on the contrary, like a base thief, suspects every eye that beholds him to be privy to his transgressions, and every tongue that mentions his name to be proclaiming them.

Guilt is present in the very hesitation, even though the deed be not committed.

Sometimes I feel very guilty, so I don't know if I am a clear example of a perfect father, because sometimes I also just punish myself, saying I'm not doing probably the right thing at this particular moment. It's a secret.

I have a feeling that I'm going to be blamed for everything that's ever happened.

I know I have to do the right thing. And the sooner you do the right thing, the better. You get it over with, and you don't have to worry about it anymore. But who does that in real life? Instead, you procrastinate and think about it and put it off and think about it some more until that one little pebble grows into a giant block inside your head.

A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It's as if I've been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I've heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There's the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don't know where these feelings have come from, what I've done.

Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn't quite sure what—apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.

It can be easy to get caught up in craziness or insecurity.

My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent.

The urging of that word, judgment, hath bred a kind of remorse in me.

They whose guilt within their bosom lies, imagine every eye beholds their blame.

O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!

But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

O how the darkness do crowd up, one against the other, in ye hearts! What fear ye more that what ye have wroughten?

Sometimes I hate having a conscience, and a stupidly thorough sense of honor.