My God What Have I Done / Literature

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• In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim strikes a little girl for not listening to him when he told her to close the door. It turns out she couldn't listen at all. She was deaf.
• In Always Coming Home, "The Miller" ends with the titular character, who just raped a woman he was obsessed with (an incestuous relationship, to boot), jumping into his watermill's wheel.
• In Animal Farm, Boxer is remorseful when he strikes a farmhand on the head and seemingly kills him. When Snowball chastises him for expressing sympathy for the enemy, Boxer, on the verge of tears, retorts that he has no wish to take any life, not even a human life.
• Animorphs:
  • Cassie has one of these way too many times to count. The Departure is one, where she comes down hard on herself after tearing out the throat of a Hork-Bajir controller.
  • Tobias has a few of them in his first few weeks as a hawk, when he's getting used to having to hunt to survive.
  • Also, Ax, in the aftermath of his threat to bomb the Yeerk Pool in The Deception.
  • And Erek, after he uses the Chee crystal to reprogram himself and goes Automaton to thrash a bunch of controllers and save the team.
  • After the war, Jake is so guilty about ordering to have the Yeerk pool flushed into space and sending Rachel, his cousin, to kill Tom, his brother (the former dies in the process) that he is driven to clinical depression. As Marco puts it: "He wore Rachel and Tom and those seventeen thousand Yeerks around his neck like the Ancient Mariner and his albatross ... He could've snapped his fingers and had anything he wanted, but he didn't want anything. Except for Rachel and Tom to be alive. For Tobias to come back. To unlive that fateful order that doomed seventeen thousand Yeerks."
  • The whole series exemplifies this, to some extent. The kids agree that self-defense is justified, but the problem is when you kill a Controller, you don't just kill the Yeerk; you're also killing the host, who is completely aware but unable to stop the Yeerk. The kids debate during the entire series what is acceptable when it comes to self-preservation and exactly how far is too far. Initially the kids take a very narrow-minded, black-and-white view — "We have the right to do anything we have to to win" — but as they mature and experience more in the war their moral lines become blurred to the point that they don't know the difference between right and wrong.
• The Assassins of Tamurin: This is Lale's reaction after she kills her would-be mugger/rapist. What stresses her out is that she didn't kill him simply in self-defense but because she was excited to put her training to the test.
• Jane Austen loves to have characters suffer a dramatic, emotionally devastating disillusionment where they realize how blind and misguided they've been about a certain topic:
  • Northanger Abbey: Catherine Moreland experiences this trope when she realizes This Is Reality, and she's been foolish to view the world and people through the lens of Gothic fiction.
  • Sense and Sensibility: Marianne experiences this trope when she regrets the excess of Emo Wangst that almost killed her.
  • Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth's turn comes when she reads Mr. Darcy's letter and realizes how flawed her judgment of Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham has been and that she herself is guilty in this area of the pride and vanity she so abhors.
  • Mansfield Park: Sir Thomas (the heroine's uncle) deeply regrets how he raised his daughters to be spoiled, vain, Brainless Beauties and what a stern, cold father he was when he sees the effects such an education has had on them.
  • Emma: Emma is horrified over the mischief and pain her matchmaking efforts cause.
  • Persuasion provides a subversion (in the correct use of the term): Near the beginning, Anne looks back with regret on breaking her engagement to Captain Wentworth, but the book ends with her realizing she was wrong and deciding I Regret Nothing. Captain Wentworth himself plays it straight when he realizes what a mistake he made never coming back to ask Anne to marry him again after he began to make his fortune.
• Bazil Broketail: When Evander saves her from would-be kidnappers, Serena invites him into the royal palace and has a little tête-à-tête with him. However, when she discovers his hideous skin beneath his clothes — courtesy of Gadjung's curse — she panics and flees to her father, fails to say a word in Evander's defence and gets him imprisoned as a result. When she calms down later, she is heartbroken by her own actions and can't forgive herself that she doomed the one who only wanted to help her.
• The Beginning After the End: After being ordered by his master Kezess to use the World Eater technique to prevent the Vritra from summoning the Legacy, an attempt that not only failed in its intended goal but left the Elven Kingdom of Elenoir completely devastated in the aftermath, Aldir is left in a state of severe distress. Not only was he extremely hesitant to use the technique in the first place and only followed his orders both out of obligation and to prevent his clan from being purged), but seeing as it killed millions of whom he felt the Asuras should have looked after yet callously sacrificed. To compound his guilt, he is immediately confronted by Seris Vritra, who not only calls him out for what he did, but also emphasizes how both Kezess and Agrona are two sides of the same coin, neither being better than the other. With his loyalty to Kezess shaken, Aldir eventually becomes a Defector from Decadence, as he not only goes against his master by subverting his plans to kill off what was left of the Dicathian Resistance, but he later departs Epheotus altogether.
• The concentration camp commander in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Losing your son because of his naivete in regards to the camp you commanded can't be a good experience for anyone.
• Non-lethal/non-romantic example: A widower-turned-priest in the Brother Cadfael series spent an entire novel trying to marry off his daughter to a man she didn't even like, because he thought that having her around would hinder his advancement in the clergy. Eventually she runs off to Dublin with a Danish youth to escape the Arranged Marriage; hearing this, her father contentedly proclaims that he'll never see her again ... and then pauses, and says it again in tones of grief, as the belated realization that he'd loved and will miss her hits home.
• Dale Brown:
  • The novel Act of War has Kelsey quite distraught after she realizes that she had unwittingly ordered Carl Bolton to his death.
  • Edge of Battle has a US Army Humongous Mecha mobbed by rioters at a detention camp for illegal immigrants and reflexively responding with predictably horrific results. When he comes back to his senses the mecha's pilot calmly and methodically climbs down from his vehicle, picks up the first available firearm and puts a bullet through his head.
• In Jeramey Kraatz's The Cloak Society book Fall of the Heroes, after Alex unleashes his powers full blast and causes Julie, with her claws fully extended, to collide with Phantom, mortally wounding her, he feels this; he's not even certain that it was an accident and wonders whether he would do it again.
• Elizabeth Báthory goes through this in Count and Countess when she realizes bathing in blood is not curing her epilepsy, and she has been killing young girls for no reason at all.
• In Cry Mercy, the third volume of Toni Andrews's Mercy Hollings series, the title character confronts her adoptive parents in order to seek answers about her mysterious origins and troubled childhood. Throughout the series, she has expressed a great deal of anger towards her adoptive parents for dissolving the adoption and giving her back as a ward of the state at the age of twelve, which led her to spend her teenage years in a series of unhappy foster homes. She believes they abandoned her because they couldn't deal with the fact that she was a psychic with the power of Compelling Voice. However, her former adoptive mother reveals that although her adoptive parents feared her powers and found her difficult to deal with, they cared about her and didn't intend to give her up until she used her Compelling Voice power to make them do so by telling them "Get out of my life and leave me alone!" in a fit of adolescent rebellion. She had repressed the memories of what had really happened, and realizes later that she is at least partly responsible for the problems that have made her miserable all her life. Mercy has another moment like this later on when trying to get an armed gunman to put down his weapon and release his hostage. She does not have perfect control of her power, and when he fails to respond at first she loses her temper and thinks, "Goddammit, why don't you just blow your own brains out?!". Her anger makes her powers kick in and she has the man's death on her conscience, although she saves the hostage.
• In Death Star, MCPO Tenn Graneet, chief gunner for the superlaser, is hit with the enormity of what he has done after destroying Alderaan, and when he is called to fire on Yavin 4, desperately stalls for time.
  Graneet: Stand by. Stand by.
• Dirge for Prester John: John realizes too late that leading his people to war was entirely the wrong thing to do. They are unable to grasp the concept of war, or even the death that accompanies it, and treat it almost like a kind of game. This ends tragically.
• In The Discreet Princess, Rich-Craft's last request is for Bel-à-Voir to marry Finette and then kill her as soon as possible. He stabs her in the heart... and since he fell in love with her by then, he is so regretful that he intends to kill himself at once as well. The only thing that stops him is that the princess was Properly Paranoid enough to use a Sleeping Dummy.
• Discworld:
  • Carrot has one of these moments in Men at Arms. He spends the night with Angua, and wakes to find a large wolf in the room (she's a werewolf). She runs away, and shortly after Carrot finds out exactly what just happened, he realizes that the first thing he did when he saw "the wolf" was reach for his sword.
  • In The Truth, after Mr. Tulip dies, Death shows him all of the terrible things he did in life... from his victim's perspectives. Mr. Tulip is so crushed by the relevation that he wants to be reincarnated solely so he can kill himself before he could do any of that.
  • In Unseen Academicals, Glenda has a moment of this after taking Juliet away from the fashion show and back to the Night Kitchen; she realizes that she shouldn't have meddled so much with Juliet, who listens to everything she says, even when it's stupid "crab bucket" stuff. In the end she encourages Juliet to think for herself (as much as she's capable) and give modeling a try.
  • In Night Watch Discworld during the Scouring of the House of Pain, Young!Sam finds a woman in one of the cells. The book doesn't detail what had happened to her, but it was enough that Nancyball fainted. Young!Sam then realises that he's been handing curfew breakers over to the same people who did that to her.
• Divergent:
  • Tris reacts this way after Al commits suicide as a result of her refusing to forgive him, though she eventually learns to live with the fact that she's not a forgiving person, and no one blames her given Al assisted in an attempt on her life and molestation.
  • The Dauntless army as a whole reacts this way along with Mass "Oh, Crap!" when Tobias ends the simulation brainwashing them as a mindless army, forcing them to remember the senseless murder they've just committed.
• Rick Deckard, the protagonist of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is a Bounty Hunter tasked with killing androids who are posing as humans. He gets one of these moments midway through the book, after eliminating an android who had been working as an opera singer, and had earlier moved him with a song. He is ashamed that he has destroyed something beautiful and, on another level, worried about what this newfound empathy for his prey says about him.
• Probably the earliest ever variation is Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, to himself: "Wretch, what hast thou done?"
  • Notably, even recognizing that what he's done is wrong, he still rejects his one last chance for salvation.
• Towards the end of Dread Locks, Parker takes off his sunglasses and looks at his best friend. Throughout the book, he had been slowly transforming into a Gorgon thanks to Tara. Once he realizes what he has done, Parker immediately regrets taking off his sunglasses.
• In the Dreamblood Duology, Ehiru's first Gathering during the story going horribly awry eats almost all of his confidence away until he becomes convinced to be unable to perform his duties anymore.
• In The Dresden Files
  • Harry Dresden postulates to Michael Carpenter, a Paladin serving G-D, the reason the Fallen Angels avoid churches isn't because Good Hurts Evil and just standing there is uncomfortable, as Michael suspects, but it makes them feel Him and remember their time loving Him and serving Him. Remembering those times makes them feel sad. They question their choices in their existence, and after a million years or more of steadfast belief you were in the right, and it turns out you were wrong and everything you did was for nothing, it is not an easy revelation to handle on one's conscience.
  • He has a couple himself. In Proven Guilty, he learns that a woman he tried to save from a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo'd xenomorph bled out, and realizes he could have saved her if he hadn't been reveling in kicking the creature's ass.
  • In Changes, he has this reaction preemptively to what he's about to do, when he conceives of the plan to get Susan to succumb to her vampire infection, then sacrifice her to kill the Red Court. The last line in the chapter is a heartbreaking, "God forgive me."
  • In Ghost Story, he sees that his zeal in saving his daughter in the previous book have left his apprentice seriously screwed up and has a moment like this.
• David Eddings:
  • In the Malloreon series it's revealed that when Zakath was a young man of nineteen and madly in love, there was a plot against his life; with overwhelming evidence that his lover was the mastermind, he sentenced her to death. Shortly afterwards, it was revealed that the mastermind was actually Taur Urgas, King of the Murgos and he had deliberately framed an innocent young woman just to spite someone he feared might one day become a threat to him. Utterly beside himself, Zakath shut himself up in a room for a month before emerging as an Empty Shell that spent the next twenty-thirty years trying to wipe out the entire Murgo race. When the Orb of Aldur reveals to him that Taur Urgas' bloodline was wiped out years ago by the current Murgo King, Urgit, who is the secret product of an affair between one of Taur Urgas' wives and a Drasnian noble, he breaks down completely and weeps over the many lives that he's taken in the pursuit of a vengeance that's no longer possible. This starts his road to redemption, which takes him a while because, even after ending his obsession, he's spent so many years as a Death Seeker driven by self-hatred that he struggles to accept that it's okay for him to allow friendship and love back into his life.
    "He has escaped me... and I've slaughtered tens of thousands for nothing..."
  • In the prequel, Belgarath the Sorcerer, as it becomes increasingly clear that the War of the Gods will be necessary, Belsambar, an Angarak exile, notes that because Angaraks build walls around everything, any attack on their cities would require the use of siege engines. He then suggests that raining fire down upon the cities would probably encourage the Angaraks to surrender more quickly. The war comes, and his brothers put his suggestions into practice, causing thousands of deaths, and driving Torak into such a panic that he actually uses the Orb of Aldur, cracking the known world in half, which naturally has catastrophic effects. Horrified at what has happened, and convinced that he was responsible for all of it, Belsambar unmakes himself, blowing both himself and his tower to bits.
• Dune has Gurney asking for Paul or Jessica to take his life after believing he has betrayed them when he holds Jessica hostage, demanding that she confess that she betrayed Leto, only to learn that it was Yueh. He is horrified that he almost took his innocent friend's life, but both Paul and Jessica freely forgive him, for they know he had been fooled and meant well.
• Ella Enchanted: Lucinda, a powerful fairy, is egotistical and flashy, believing that she's doing wonderful things by giving people the gift of obedience or turning them into squirrels. When Ella is pushed one step too far by her Wicked Stepmother and abusive stepsisters exploiting her curse of total obedience, her nanny Mandy summons Lucinda and challenges her to last six months under those curses, three as a squirrel and three being a totally obedient child. Lucinda is a crying wreck when the six months are up and is horrified with how she's ruined so many lives, promising never to use magic so recklessly again. Though of course, that also means that she's unwilling to break Ella's curse (and the others she'd cursed) herself...
• Ellen and Otis: Twice in Ellen Tebbits.
  • Ellen has this reaction in the first chapter of the book when she lashes out at Austine, who has just moved to Portland from California, for talking about California all the time. She apologizes afterward and the two become friends.
  • Later, she has this reaction immediately after slapping Austine across the face for allegedly untying the sash of her dress, thus seemingly ending their friendship. It doesn't help later when she finds out that the culprit was Otis, and not Austine.
• The end of Ender's Game sees Ender discovering that the simulations he and his team mates had run in Command School weren't simulations but ansible transmissions: the ships he sacrificed to win had contained real, living soldiers, as had the enemy ships he annihilated, and by destroying what he thought was a simulation of the enemy home planet, he had actually done just that and committed xenocide without knowing it. He also finds out about this time that he not just defeated but actually killed Stilson and Bonzo; he never heard about their deaths before.
  • The Formics get this too in the backstory when they, a hive minded species that places no value on the mindless drones used to fight wars, discovered that each and every human being they killed during their two wars with humanity was as much an individual as the Formic queens. Though they fight back when the humans invade them, they don't expect to win or even survive: they had recognized how humanity would have seen their invasions, and didn't expect to ever be forgiven for a crime of that magnitude. "The humans have not forgiven us; we shall surely perish."
• Epithet Erased: Prison of Plastic: While Lorelai spends most of the story as a self-centered Jerkass, even she is horrified and filled with regret when Rick intercepts a deadly spell she intended to cast on her younger sister Molly (who would have been immune to it). She quickly drops her Hare-idan persona and hurriedly tries to fix what she just did while repeating that she was "only playing". The experience leaves her seriously rattled and wracked with guilt, and is the start of her attitude crumbling.
• Forbidden: Because of the nature of their relationship, both Lochan and Maya have this reaction at various stages when they think about the harm they could do to their family and each other. Kit also has a pretty major one after he, in a moment of misdirected anger, tells their mother about them and she calls the police.
• In the Fortunes of War books, Piper's misguided attempt to help Sarda's career basically ruined his life. She is intensely guilty over this, and one of the main plot points of the overall story, especially in Dreadnought!, is her clumsy efforts to try to make things right with him.
• The titular doctor in Frankenstein experiences this feeling immediately after bringing his creation to life. After working himself to the bone for months over this project, the realization that he has created a hideous mess of a creature instead of the ideal man he had intended sends him into a bout of brain fever lasting for months.
  • The monster himself has one at the end when he discovers that Victor Frankenstein has died of exhaustion from chasing him all over Europe. After realizing that killing Victor's innocent family members and family friend out of anger at his creator was all for nothing, and that he has become the monster everyone thought he was, he plans to commit suicide in order to atone for his crimes.
• In Aaron Allston's Galatea in 2-D, the hero tortures one of the villain's mooks to try to get information from another. He slackens off without getting everything he wanted, realizing that she didn't know anything and that he was invoking What Measure Is a Mook?. That thought horrifies him — just because they were two paintings who came to life, and whom the villain had sent to kill him didn't mean torturing them was all right. In the end, the villain is killed, but the hero tells the mooks that if they stay out of his way, he won't bother them.
• In Galaxy of Fear:
  • Off-page, Mammon Hoole performed an experiment that unleashed a World-Wrecking Wave on the planet he was on; only he and his coworker escaped the devastation, which killed all life on Kiva. Utterly horrified and blaming himself, he hid for four years and came out of it as an emotionally crippled Atoner, determined to try and make some good of his life. It all came crashing back in when he was forced to return to Kiva and saw the furious Kivan wraiths, who blamed him just as much as he blamed himself. He didn't think the experiment would turn so catastrophic; his coworker knew but didn't tell him, wanting to see it happen.
  • In the last book, an Apocalyptic Log made by someone stranded on Dagobah is found. The last entry has this.
  "Some of the survivors went ahead and started families. They've had children. That's the worst. We're all on the edge of starvation... and now we have children to feed. We've gotten so hungry... the children crying from hunger... that we've-" The woman on the hologram shuddered and started to cry. "May the stars forgive us... we've fed them meat from—"
• In The Girl from the Miracles District, Nikita has this moment after killing Ture on her mother's orders, realizing that even after all those years, she's still Irena's puppet, and that she should've helped Ture. In an inversion of the usual course of events, the realization makes her stronger.
• In John C. Wright's The Golden Age, Helion tells Phaethon his origin: he had been a character in a scenario who destroyed a planet. His My God, What Have I Done? reaction caused him to brood over questions of existence, and the brooding caused him to become a self-aware personality, no longer just a character.
• Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi:
  • Xiao Xingchen was horrified when Xue Yang gleefully revealed that he had tricked Xiao Xingchen into murdering innocent villagers over the years and killing his best friend Song Lan.
  • While he never fully admitted that it was his fault that Xiao Xingchen committed suicide, Xue Yang's breakdown that he wasn't able to reanimate and bring Xiao Xingchen back to life implied that deep down Xue Yang did blame himself.
  • Jin Ling was implied to feel guilty for attacking and stabbing Wei Wuxian in a fit of rage. The audio drama and donghua made it more explicit by having him stammer or stagger back in horror after he committed the deed.
• Charles Dickens wasn't averse to this sort of twist. In Great Expectations, the malignant Miss Havisham gives us the following line:
  "O!" she cried, despairingly. "What have I done! What have I done!"
• Halvgudene: It happens when Trigg gets hurt, and another member of the guild tries to joke away her shame over her black blood by licking off the blood that gets on her hands, only to die of poisoning since her blood is poisoneous, leaving her with extreme guilt...
• Harahpin:
  • Thrym becomes disgusted with himself when he realizes just what he did to Euron and Eyrco.
  • Euron's reaction when he realizes that him leaving to go help Eyrco and Solarus with Desmodea resulted in Saphillin taking off. The fact that the planet has nothing but hostile lifeforms, save for Gold-Patches, and the fact that Saphillin is so unresponsive that he wouldn't defend himself against any threat makes his guilt so much worse.
• In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, after Harry, panicking and about to be Crucio-ed by Draco, unwittingly tries out his new "Sectumsempra" spell for the first time in the bathroom. The result is Draco being slashed open. Whoops.
  • Also Severus Snape, after he realizes his actions have inadvertently sentenced a woman he loves to death. He's described as looking like "a man who had lived a hundred years of misery".
  • And in the film version of Goblet of Fire, when Harry doesn't resurface from the Hogwarts Lake for a minute or so after being given his underwater breathing apparatus (Gillyweed), Neville gasps, "Oh my God— I've killed Harry Potter!" Harry then promptly does a spectacular backflip out of the water, making everybody know he's quite alright.
  • Ginny Weasley's attempt to destroy Riddle's diary in Chamber of Secrets was (probably) a reaction to this trope. In any case, she was in full mode of this trope after being saved by Harry at the end. Poor Ginny. It must be... devastating doesn't even describe it... for an eleven-year-old to realize her actions have very nearly caused the deaths of half her friends and her crush. Maybe that's why she was so sympathetic to Harry after the "Sectumsempra" incident.
  • Ariana's death — possibly at his own hands — was this for Dumbledore.
  • Harry, when he realises his actions lead to Sirius' death; probably Sirius' reaction when he realised James and Lily died because of his suggestion of using Wormtail as a secret keeper over him.
  • Presumably Percy Weasley before he reconciles with his family after a three-year estrangement, which resulted from his own pomposity and selfish career ambitions.
  • The Bloody Baron (Slytherin's house ghost) had this reaction after accidentially killing Helena Ravenclaw, the daughter of Rowena Ravenclaw, who was the founder of the Hogwarts House bearing her name. Realizing what he'd done, he immediately killed himself with the same blade he had killed Helena with, spending eternity covered in his own blood.
• In Flag in Exile, Honor Harrington is attacked by an assassin who sees her as a corrupting agent of Satan... but the beloved leader of his church takes the bullet for her. Horrified, he drops the gun and falls to his knees: "My God, my God—what have You let me do?"
• The Hundred Dresses has a big one. The whole class, including Maddie and Peggy, have been teasing Polish girl Wanda for claiming she has a hundred dresses when she wears the same frock to school. They instantly become ashamed when her father pulls her out of school a few days later and says in the big city no one will be calling his daughter funny names. What makes it worse is the teacher calmly reads the letter, and then says, "I trust that no one would have been intentionally cruel" but to consider this a learning experience, while barely holding herself together. No one is happy for the rest of the day. Maddie thinks to herself that she ought to have said something, and Peggy is the one to suggest that they should see if Wanda is still at home so they can apologize. It's too late; the family's moved out.
• Inkmistress: Asra is horrified when her spell goes wrong, inadvertently causing the people of Amalska to be slaughtered by bandits.
• In the Presence of Mine Enemies: A woman who accuses Heinrich of being a Jew (not realizing he is one) after he spurns her advances is horrified upon realizing that this has gotten his children arrested for being part-Jewish and could get them executed.
• In the final book of the Inheritance Cycle, Eragon uses a non-verbal spell in order to defeat Galbatorix. Galbatorix holds both Eragon and his half-brother Murthag captured, using magic, and prevents them from using the ancient language. The spell Eragon then uses literally makes Galbatorix realise what he has done, by telepathically giving him the viewpoint of the situation that Eragon sees.
  • During the darker part of his lifetime Galbatorix destroyed the entire order of Dragonriders. He has killed every last dragon except for Shruikan (his own) and three dragon eggs and later revealed Glaedr, an Elder dragon hidden by the elves... He gets killed in the third book though. He conquered Alagaësia and formed his evil empire, although that's not as bad as the fact that he almost wiped out an entire species.
• In the novelette "El Inquisidor De Mexico", this is Don Domingo's reaction upon realising Sara is his daughter, and he's sent her to die.
• I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level: Azusa, without quite understanding the cultural significance of it, gets tricked into touching Flatorte's horns thinking it will help foster peace between the Red and Blue Dragons. What she didn't realize was just how completely Blue Dragons become subservient to their mistress or master, never leaving their side and not even eating or sleeping unless specifically ordered to, and if they should leave their mistress/master's side for any reason, even being ordered to, the dragon will commit suicide. Azusa is pretty understandably freaked out and compares it to actual slavery.
• Journey to Chaos: The true immensity of Nunnal's gamble at the climax of Mana Mutation Menace doesn't hit her until after its over.
  This decision will haunt me for the rest of my eternal life
• In The Kharkanas Trilogy the Terondai Draconus commissioned from Errastas needed a blood sacrifice, but nobody bothered to tell him that. When he finds out that he indirectly killed Hood's wife Karish, he is rather horrified.
• King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table: After Iseult of the White Hands causes the deaths of Tristam and Iseult the Fair through her jealousy of their relationship, she repents and has them buried together.
• Knowledge Of Angels: Severo reacts this way after he realizes what is going to happen with Palinor after he turned him over to the Inquisition.
• The Last Days of Krypton: Tyr-Us spends his last few moments numbly taking responsibility for his role in Krypton's destruction.
• Laughing Jack: Upon realising that her knife hit her son's heart instead of the merciless clown who bloodied him, James' mother is devastated beyond belief.
  No… what have I done? My baby, I killed my baby! I immediately fell to my knees, and I could hear sirens in the distance growing louder… My boy, my sweet baby boy… I promised mommy would protect you… But I failed… I’m sorry James… I’m so sorry…
• Tsion Ben-Judah's reaction in in the Left Behind book Desecration when he realizes he has given away the location of where the Israeli Jews would flee to according to what the Book of Revelation says about the matter (the deserted city of Petra), fearing that he has messed up God's plan. He gets some reassurance from one of the Tribulation Force members that God may have intended for Tsion to let slip the location of where the Jews would flee to in order to lure Nicolae Carpathia's forces into a trap God has set up for them, which is all according to the Word of God.
• Involved in the climax and ending of The Left Hand of God trilogy. Can't really say anything about it without giving away much of the ending. Redeemer Bosco had been raising the protagonist, Thomas Cale, brutally since he was a little child because he believed Cale was The Chosen One who was to embody God's wrath and destroy all of humanity for its sins. When Cale instead leads an army that destroys the Redeemers, clearly falsifying the notion that God's plan was what Bosco thought, Bosco comes to believe he was wrong and he was supposed to raise Cale lovingly so that he might redeem humanity. He takes this... let's just say, just as seriously as he took the previous ideas that led to his being a Knight Templar Omnicidal Maniac.
• The Legend of Drizzt:
  • In The Dark Elf Trilogy (the second book, Exile), Drizzt ponders on this when he starts to realize that living on the run all the time, constantly paranoid, has caused him to start to lose his humanity, especially after cutting off his sister's fingers and nearly killing his brother; however, it isn't until Gwehywvar looks him in the eye that he starts to realize it and tries to find ways to regain said humanity... or elfmanity.
  • Gromph at the end of Archmage, first book of the Homecoming trilogy, shortly after realizing that he just summoned the Prince of Demons to Menzoberranzan. He almost scratches his own eyes out before fleeing to Gauntlgrym.
• Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse: After she draws a mean picture of Mr. Slinger as revenge for her purse getting taken away, Lilly feels absolutely horrible after she gets it back and finds a bag of tasty snacks in it and a note that says, "Today was a difficult day. Tomorrow will be better."
• The Little Prince: When the pilot is trying to repair his airplane and he is getting distracted by the titular Prince's questions relating to sheep eating roses despite them having thorns, he just curtly cuts him off, tells him that roses just make thorns out of spite and to let him work. This causes the Little Prince to fly into a rage, deliver a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to the pilot and saying why the ordeal of roses and sheep should be considered Serious Business before he finally breaks down into tears. The pilot immediately feels awful and tries his best to console the young alien.
• The Lord of Bembibre: His wife's death and his daughter's unhappiness and failing health finally clue Don Alonso in on the fact that his daughter is dying because he has been an utterly terrible father.
• The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali: After Sohail's murder due to being gay, Rukhsana's parents come to realize it could have been her, and what they did with rejecting her. They apologize profusely, with a reconciliation because of this.
• Les Misérables: Jean Valjean has a breakdown after he robbed a child. The robbing happened right after his encounter with Bishop Myriel, who gave him a second chance at freedom after Valjean betrayed the Bishop's trust and robbed from him. The combination of these two events cause a guilt trip several pages long.
• Appears near the end of Manon des Sources for Papet. He discovers that Jean, the man who he had ruined in the first part of the duology, was actually his son. Florette hadn't rejected him, as he thought, but was pregnant and had tried to move on when he didn't respond to her letter (a letter he obviously never received). Watching the look on Papet's face when this fact sinks in will quickly show the viewer why this movie launched Yves Montand to worldwide critical acclaim.
• At the beginning of The Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard sells his wife Susan and infant daughter Elizabeth-Jane at auction for five guineas in a drunken haze, having never seen them as anything other than a burden. When he sobers up the next morning, he is horrified by the realisation of what he has done, but as the buyer, a sailor named Richard Newson, is not local to the area, he has no way to find him or his family, and so he swears off alcohol for twenty-one years as penance.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Amuro Ray in the novel; this is however repeated later by the greenhorn Zeon pilot and Char's wingman, Lt. (jg) Leroy Gilliam after one-shotting the Gundam and killing Amuro in a case of (just at that point) friendly fire from his Rick Dom.
• In Moby-Dick, Ahab has a moment like this when the Pequod sinks with Starbuck aboard. Starbuck was a good man, the only man on the ship who never let himself be sucked into Ahab's mad quest or cult of personality, and therefore the only one who manifestly did not deserve such a horrible fate. Ahab himself dies moments afterward.
• Monster of the Month Club: In Book 2, Burly accidentally makes Chelsea sick when he takes her out of the water and she stays out too long. He's horrified when Rilla points this out to him.
• Mother of Learning: Before the story started, Taiven once encouraged Zorian to be more assertive in asking girls out. He then proceeded to ask her out, which she took as a joke, laughing in his face and continuing to periodically bring it up later as an example of how he can be funny. During the time loop, she finds out he was serious, that he had a crush on her that he's now grown out of, and she's horrified with herself.
• My Name Is Legion: The protagonist of "The Eve of RUMOKO" has his moment near the end, after the RUMOKO project goes wrong and destroys an entire city, killing everyone in it including the protagonist's love interest. The protagonist had worked security on the RUMOKO project and spent most of the story foiling a saboteur who had been trying to shut the project down to prevent exactly that outcome.
• The Neverending Story: Bastian, after turning to the dark side for a while and nearly killing Atreyu... in fact, he thought he flat-out had killed Atreyu, which makes his "My God, What Have I Done?" even more dramatic.
• No Talking: In the penultimate chapter, Ms. Hiatt feels ashamed of herself for losing her temper and yelling at Kyle during his second day of being an Elective Mute. She apologizes to him and agrees to join the challenge herself.
• In Omega Rising, Jenny has one of these when she realises that Knight is really Ethan after she helps in his capture.
• In Over the Wine-Dark Sea Sostratos tells Menedemos a story of a Pancrationist (one of the nastiest combat sports invented) in Athens who kills his opponent (a very easy thing to do in Pancration) and goes mad with rage because of it.
• The Poisonwood Bible: Nathan, after Ruth May dies unbaptized due to his desire for a dramatic conversion of the village.
• Project Tau: Renfield, when he realizes that Kalin was telling the truth all along, and that he's been participating in the illegal imprisonment and torture of a fellow human being as opposed to just another Project.
  Renfield: "Oh dear sweet Jesus. Mason, what have you done? What have I done?"
  Mason: "Your job, of course."
• In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Lost, Miranda leads a boat that is pursuing hers on a route that ends with his crashing and dying. In Prospero In Hell, she learns he wasn't an enemy. Nearly has Tears of Remorse.
• In the Rainbow Magic series, in Jennifer the Hairstylist Fairy's book, Rachel and Kirsty accidentally wreck a goblin's wig while trying to help Jennifer. Upon seeing his saddened reaction, they feel incredibly guilty and agree to restore it if he gives back the magic hairbrush.
• In The Reader (2016), Sefia is absolutely traumatized after taking a life, even though it was in self-defence, and for a long time doubts she'd ever be able to do it again.
• In Harry Turtledove's The Road Not Taken an alien race called the Roxolani attempts to invade Earth...and fails miserably. The thing of it is, the secret of the Roxolani's antigravity and FTL technology turned out to be so absurdly simple that it left their race in a kind of Medieval Stasis, halting their technology at the level of cannons and black powder muskets. Somehow, Earth completely missed the secret of antigravity and FTL, forcing them to exploit every other area of science and technology. After the Roxolani invasion fails miserably, the survivors are taken prisoner and questioned. The captives take note of the fact that humans seem extremely advanced in all areas of science, except they never discovered the secret of interstellar travel. When one of the captives points out that now the humans do know the secret because of the failed invasion, the Roxolani turn to each other and ask themselves, "What have we done?"
• In Sam, Bangs & Moonshine, Sam cries with guilt after her lie leads to Thomas and Bangs nearly drowning.
• Scavenge the Stars:
  • Kamon Mercado becomes depressed and is even willing to have his son kill him when he learns that his distribution of fake gold coins to make himself wealthy led to his daughter being infected with an illness linked to the coins and later losing her life.
  • Boon becomes depressed and starts drinking himself into a stupor after finding out his fake gold coins ended up distributed to the poor and a side effect of the materials used to make the coins led to them killing the poor residents of Moray.
• In Scavenger Alliance, Tad recruited Phoenix and Braden for his expedition to Earth and then Beta sector, but his mistake cost them their transport and stranded them in New York. Because of this, they're vulnerable to the Alliance, the winter fever and the coming firestorm. Tad feels horrible that his decisions have endangered their lives and much of what he does is motivated by the need to keep them safe. He and Blaze head out to an abandoned storage facility for medicine partly in case the offworlders come down with winter fever. They do. Tad and Phoenix almost die from the disease, and the medicine is what saves them.
• Discussed in The Screwtape Letters: The Devil actually prefers people to not commit egregious sins that evoke this reaction, as the ensuing Heel Realization is likely to lead to them repenting and trying to get right with God, which of course is the opposite of what the Devil wants.
• Shadow of the Conqueror:
  • Ten years before the book begins, Daylen finally comprehended the full extent of his crimes, which sent him headlong into depression. He strongly considered killing himself then and there, but decided to stay alive simply because he felt he deserved the punishment of his endless guilt. He has the reaction all over again whenever he's reminded of one of his worse crimes.
  • When Lyrah attempts to arrest him, a combination of self-defense instinct, anger at the injustice, and his own berserk tendencies makes Daylen prepare to fight her to the death. After escaping and calming down, Daylen is horrified that he almost tried to kill her, considering it Fury-Fueled Foolishness given who she is. The next time they cross swords, he goes out of his way to avoid seriously injuring her, saying point-blank that he'd never kill her, even in self-defense.
  • Daylen doesn't think much of killing Blackheart given what an Asshole Victim he is, until he finds out that Blackheart was telling the truth about being a royal bastard, and was Daylen's own son. This knowledge is incredibly painful for him, as Offing the Offspring was one crime he never committed as Emperor, and the loss of his beloved first two children was the catalyst that turned him into Dayless the Conqueror in the first place.
  • Cueseg's response when he learns exactly why Lyrah has a Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality, as he realizes just how much pain he's been causing her with his antics.
• Dimitri's general reaction after he is changed from a Strigoi back into a dhampir by Lissa in Spirit Bound.
  "I did a lot of things . . . horrible things." He turned his hands palm-up and stared at them for a moment, like he could see blood. "What I did to her was worst of all—especially because it was her. She came to save me from that state, and I. . ." He shook his head. "I did terrible things to her. Terrible things to others. I can't face her after that. What I did was unforgivable."
• The Stand by Stephen King: Harold, after he leaves Boulder post-explosion and crashes in the middle of the desert.
  • Nadine too, after she's pregnant with Flagg's baby — she has one so hard that she goads Flagg into throwing her off a penthouse balcony to kill her and the baby.
• Stephen Fry's The Stars' Tennis Balls has its vengeance-obsessed hero break free of his island prison and return to Britain to pursue a drawn-out violent campaign against those whom he sees responsible. After various horrific killings, he looks forward to reuniting with his college sweetheart. But she knows what he's done. The close of the book has him voluntarily returning to the prison he escaped, in all likelihood to stay there until he dies.
• The Stormlight Archive:
  • In the novella Edgedancer, one of the villains has this reaction when he realizes that he's been serving the wrong cause all along.
  Nale: Storms. Jezrien... Ishar... It is true. I've failed. (...) I failed weeks ago. I knew it then. Oh God! Oh God the Almighty!
  • In Oathbringer, Venli starts to have this reaction over the course of the book as she realises how bad an idea it was to bring her people's gods back and how she basically got her people, including her sister and her sort-of-husband, killed as well as screwing over the entire population of the planet.
  • Dalinar has this reaction when he accidentally kills his wife Evi, because she was a prisoner unbeknownst to him when he ordered The Rift burned down and the inhabitants killed. He even killed her personally by lighting the fire to a room that he believed was a safe room for the leader of the city, when it was really converted into a prison.
• The Swampling King: Duke Lenoden is horrified when he unleashes the deeplings on the Plateaus. After, though, he still blames Josen for "forcing" him to it What did Josen do to deserve this? He survived Lenoden's assassination attempt and then told people what had happened.
• In a flashback in Terra Ignota, Mycroft has a breakdown when he is wheeled into Madame's parlor and realizes he didn't have to kill Apollo and the Mardis to prevent a world war, as there were already mechanisms being put in place to prevent it. This leads him to become the Actual Pacifist he is by the time of Too Like the Lightning.
• J. R. R. Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Lord of the Rings:
    • Boromir's moment, when he realizes how badly he screwed up by attempting to take the Ring from Frodo, leads directly to his Redemption Equals Death.
    • The Steward's family is big on these moments. Denethor has another when his younger son, Faramir, is brought back dying after being wounded in a pointless battle which Denethor sent him into.
  • The Silmarillion:
    • Túrin has this reaction after he kills Beleg and Brandir. He kills himself after the second one.
    • His father Húrin has a similar reaction when he realises his attempts to avenge his family have only helped Morgoth. He too kills himself.
    • Maedhros has one when his attempt to get the Silmarils from King Dior leads to the deaths of Dior's two young sons, and he and his brother Maglor have an epic one later when they realise that all the evil they committed in the pursuit of the Silmarils was for nothing because, after all the evils they've committed in search of the Silmarils, the holy jewels burn them. Maedhros then kills himself while Maglor spends the rest of time Wandering the Earth singing laments.
• In The Underland Chronicles, Hamnet has this when while trying to drive the rats out of the Garden of the Hesperidies, he permanently floods the garden, destroying the apple trees, drowning countless rats, bats, humans, and even the rat pups who had been taken into the cave to escape the fighting, leading to him fleeing Regalia to live in the jungle.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In James Swallow's Warhammer 40,000 novel Deus Sanguinius, Arkio's first words (after "Brother") when he is Dying as Yourself. He is deeply moved by Rafen's Manly Tears, and while quite certain of his own damnation, begs Rafen's forgiveness.
  • In Ben Counter's Warhammer 40,000 Horus Heresy novel Galaxy in Flames, after Aximand kills Torgaddon, he sobs, asks what they did, and speaks of how they had been their brothers. Abaddon (who merely thinks Was It Really Worth It?) thinks he needs to be watched.
  • In Graham McNeill's Fulgrim, Fulgrim's first words after he killed Ferrus Manus, were "Throne save me, what have I done?". His sword lets him realize the depths of his crime, and that his view of Ferrus Manus had been formed by spiteful misinterpretation of his deeds.
• Warrior Cats: Lionblaze does this a lot in the latter half of Power of Three, usually after he loses control of himself, or during one of his homicidal Nightmare Dreams.
  • Brambleclaw also thinks this when he accuses Leafpool of revealing to the other medicine cats of the badger attack. Bonus points for realizing that he made things worse by telling Hawkfrost, who told ShadowClan in return. Because of this, he couldn't apologize to Leafpool or else he would reveal he and his brother were visiting Tigerstar.
  • Clear Sky gets this at the end of The First Battle, realizing that his fear of others dying had made him a monster, obsessed with order and borders. He, along with the other founders, promises to make things right after the battle at Fourtrees.
• In The Wheel of Time, Rand has one when he almost kills his father during a heated argument in The Gathering Storm. Quite a few of his friends have been telling him in book after book that he's going too far in his actions and losing it, but it doesn't sink in until this confrontation.
• In The White Plague, the villain is John Roe O'Neill. O'Neill is an ordinary molecular biologist driven insane when his family is killed in front of him by an IRA car bomb while on vacation in Ireland. His personality fragmenting, he designs a plague that infects everyone, making men carriers and killing all women, with the intent of using it to punish the Irish (for creating the bomb), the English (for driving the Irish to terrorism), and the Libyans (for training the terrorists) by killing their wives and daughters. At the end of the book the poor man goes *sane*. He ends up a legend in Ireland as "The Madman", a tragic figure who you hear screaming in the night and leave food out for.
• Susan's aunt from Wizard and Glass may have died of this trope, as it's speculated that her fatal heart attack occurs when she comes out of her enraged trance and realizes that she's just gotten her innocent, and pregnant, niece burned at the stake.
• In Worm, the hero Eidolon, who suffers from Chronic Hero Syndrome and has powers that let him combine other heroes' powers together, has one of these when he learns that the Endbringers, colossal Kaiju-esque monsters that he has been fighting and who have killed hundreds of millions of people across the globe, are created by his own powers and his need to find and fight a Worthy Opponent. This revelation leaves him virtually catatonic as a result.
• In The Worst Thing About My Sister, when Marty accidentally knocks out Melissa, she feels very guilty and afraid that Melissa may die.

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