fiefoe

On self-respect: (written when she was quite young)

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across tow pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes.
The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others.
Reputation, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without.
(Self-respect)concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.
People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.
Character, a quality which .. sometimes loses ground to other, more instantl nogotiable virtues.
To give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines
To (have self-respect) is potentially to have everything: the ability to discrimiate, to love and to remain indifferent.

a fantasy in the most clinical sense of that word | donnee
some hint of the monstrous perversion to which any human idea can come
That the ethic of conscience is instrinsically insidious seems scarcely a revelatory point.
When we start decieving ourselves into thining not that we want something or need something, .. but that it is a _moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land

"Slouching Towards Bethlehem"