"The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides."

Shame, Trauma, Pain, Identity

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"The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides."

Exlpore more Shame quotes

"Shame weakens us. It can make us frightened to take on something new. We start to withdraw from whatever might give us pleasure, self-esteem, or a sense of our value."

Sharon Salzberg, American Author

Shame, Fear, Truth, Self-Worth

"Ira Gershwin, shame on him. I mean, some of the writing."

Joni Mitchell, Canadian Musician

Shame, Writing

"We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough."

Mokokoma Mokhonoana, South African Philosopher

Shame, Truth, Humanity, Privacy

"The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn't know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong-only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides."

Donna Tartt, American Novelist

Shame, Trauma, Pain, Identity

"She had wanted me to hold rape inside me like a dark pearl, keep it in there, as it grew, as I grew cramped, as it overtook me as hidden things do. Secrets become lies. I'd carried in every step I took this lie, the shame of it."

Aspen Matis, American Author

Shame, Secrets, Trauma, Truth

"I'm dying from about ninety-nine kinds of shame."

Sherman Alexie, American Writer

Shame, Emotion, Sensitivity, Pain

"That's the trouble with anything which essentially has a lot of bits that are physically impossible: You're left, stuck, in the studio. And that's a shame. You're making a movie. You don't want it to stay put, you want it to be a movie - to move."

Robbie Coltrane, Scottish Actor

Shame, Trouble, Want

"Most of the groups I worked with 30 years ago are either dead or dead broke. And it's a shame."

Ronnie Spector, American Musician

Shame, Years

"When you're ashamed of their action, to ask them the reason of their actions can make you a fool."

Auliq Ice, Ugandan Economist

Shame, Action, Reason, Fool

"You can cry, ain't no shame in it."

Will Smith, American Actor

Shame,

Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt

"Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction."

Life

"But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work."

Work

"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."

People

"I believe, in a funny way, the job of the novelist is to be out there on the fringes and speaking for an experience that has not really been spoken for."

Experience

"It's a long story. I'll make it short as I can."

Brevity

"So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter."

Environment

"It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate."

Fate

"Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more."

Youth

"Real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut."

Time

"What's worth living for? what's worth dying for? what's completely foolish to pursue?"

Meaning