"Jack "Hey, times are tough, and thirty gold coins can do a lot of good. But I guess you wouldn't know about needing money, since you grew up like a little princ..."
(Rapunzel glares)
Jack continues "Prin... soner. I mean, prisoner! A prisoner in a tower, such a shame, that.""
— Shannon Hale

"I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed."
— Jonathan Swift

""You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. 'What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?' And so they sit there and they... die. Because they didn't do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.""
— David Mamet

"(You do not have to be shamed in my closeness. Family are the people who must never make you feel ashamed.)

(You are wrong. Family are the people who must make you feel ashamed when you are deserving of shame.)

(And you are deserving of shame?)

(I am. I am trying to tell you.) 'We were stupid,' he said, 'because we believed in things.'

'Why is this stupid?'

'Because there are not things to believe in.'

(Love?)

(There is no love. Only the end of love.)

(Goodness?)

(Do not be a fool.)

(God?)

(If God exists, He is not to be believed in.)"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel)

"I am ashamed of anyone who has eyes and still can't see."
— Kathryn Lasky (The Journey)

"Shame is always easier to handle if you have someone to share it with."
— Craig Thompson (Blankets)

"Now I know what they mean when they say 'to pull a Charlie Gordon.' I'm ashamed (41)."
— Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon)

"You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations."
— Alice Munro (Open Secrets: Stories)

"You'll find the shame is like the pain, you only feel it once. "
— Marquise de Merteuil

""The revolt against one's environment is usually 'shame' of one's environment." "
— Czeslaw Milosz

"The girl's life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was something of the woman's original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light step approaching the door opposite to that by which she had entered, and thought of the wide contrast which the small room would in another moment contain, she felt burdened with the sense of her own deep shame: and shrunk as though she could scarcely bear the presence of her with whom she had sought this interview."
— Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist)

" Look: the trees exist; the houses
we dwell in stand there stalwartly.
Only we
pass by it all, like a rush of air.
And everything conspires to keep quiet
about us,
half out of shame perhaps, half out of
some secret hope."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

"From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. "
— John Updike

"If an enthusiastic, ardent, and ambitous man marry a wife on whose name there is a stain, which, though it originate in no fault of hers, may be visited by cold and sordid people upon her, and upon his children also: and, in exact proportion to his success in the world, be cast in his teeth, and made the subject of sneers against him: he may-no matter how generous and good his nature- one day repent of the connection he formed in early life; and she may have the pain and torture of knowing that he does so."
— Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist)