That has to be the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to me in my whole life.

You know that your truth, the one that you hide… is the thing you are most afraid of.

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

[T]he anti-Semitism, I was in on, and that's the part I'm really ashamed of.

My ignorance was inexcusable, and it made me ashamed.

"I felt ashamed."

"But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?"

"No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal — of being a mortal."

"But how could you help that?"

"Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help?"

The most difficult element is perhaps the lack of privacy in my life.

He feels particularly ashamed if ever he is seen by his lovers to be invovled in something dishonourable.

I now see, was the fact that there were so many areas of my emotional life where I was muddled and unresolved and therefore ripe for horrendous embarrassment that I was pointlessly guarded about everything. The lurking fear that I might accidentally give away something I did not want to reveal resulted in blanket self-censorship.

I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face

I was not much afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace.But that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. I should have rejoiced if the earth had swallowed me up and stifled me in the abyss. But my invincible sense of shame prevailed over everything . It was my shame that made me impudent, and the more wickedly I behaved the bolder my fear of confession made me. I saw nothing but the horror of being found out, of being publicly proclaimed, to my face, as a thief, as a liar, and slanderer.

He wished at that moment that his whole life had not been a secret, that lots of people were like him, instead of his being alone in a world where everyone was secure in their place as either woman or man. His aloneness was what made him feel ashamed, and he did not know why it had to be so.

Personal publicity of every kind is utterly distasteful to me, and I have made greater efforts to escape it than most people make to get it.

There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves.