"How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit"
About this Quote
Pritchett’s line is a small knife aimed at the pieties of conscience. The shock isn’t just the paradox - guilt over crimes you can’t even pull off - but the accusation embedded in it: a lot of what passes for moral sensitivity is really status anxiety, thwarted appetite, or the ego’s need to dramatize itself. If you’re “unable” to commit a sin, your innocence may be less virtue than lack of access, nerve, charm, or opportunity. Yet the mind, addicted to being the protagonist, manufactures guilt anyway, turning incapacity into a kind of spiritual melodrama.
The subtext is quietly brutal about self-image. Feeling guilt about the uncommitted sin lets you keep two flattering stories at once: you’re pure in public, and you’re interesting in private. It’s a fantasy of temptation without consequence, transgression without risk. Pritchett is also puncturing a particular middle-class English moral atmosphere, where repression and self-scrutiny can become a substitute for action. The “extraordinary” is that guilt functions like a social currency: it signals refinement, depth, a conscience active enough to worry even when nothing has happened.
Context matters because Pritchett came of age amid 20th-century disillusionment, watching respectability buckle under war, class strain, and personal compromise. In that world, moral talk often serves as camouflage. The line implies that guilt can be less a response to harm done than a response to the humiliating limits of the self - the sins we can’t commit because we’re not bold enough, desired enough, or free enough.
The subtext is quietly brutal about self-image. Feeling guilt about the uncommitted sin lets you keep two flattering stories at once: you’re pure in public, and you’re interesting in private. It’s a fantasy of temptation without consequence, transgression without risk. Pritchett is also puncturing a particular middle-class English moral atmosphere, where repression and self-scrutiny can become a substitute for action. The “extraordinary” is that guilt functions like a social currency: it signals refinement, depth, a conscience active enough to worry even when nothing has happened.
Context matters because Pritchett came of age amid 20th-century disillusionment, watching respectability buckle under war, class strain, and personal compromise. In that world, moral talk often serves as camouflage. The line implies that guilt can be less a response to harm done than a response to the humiliating limits of the self - the sins we can’t commit because we’re not bold enough, desired enough, or free enough.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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