Happiness is the highest form of self-respect. A person who allows himself to be happy shows his self-respect.
The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others _ who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O__ara, is something people with courage can do without.To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one__ failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There__ the glass you broke in anger, there__ the hurt on X__ face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions 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.
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The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others _ who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O__ara, is something people with courage can do without.To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one__ failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There__ the glass you broke in anger, there__ the hurt on X__ face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions 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.
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Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be where no storms come.
During last night__ insomnia, as these thoughts came and went between my aching temples, I realised once again, what I had almost forgotten in this recent period of relative calm, that I tread a terribly tenuous, indeed almost non-existent soil spread over a pit full of shadows, whence the powers of darkness emerge at will to destroy my life_