On Self-Respect Quotes

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. (...) To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone
it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves."
To protest”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced
stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want
something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea
alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains
the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses
such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To
assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of
others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of
self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one
runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“(...) the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be
the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful
amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is
potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain
indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of
either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand
forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little
perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life - is the source from which self-respect springs.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect