Explaining Yourself Quotes

“For as Molly looked at him, she felt an immediate … she didn’t know what. Despite her love of the language arts, she also possessed an analytic mind, and that mind straightaway tried to seek out the why. And it couldn’t unearth the reason apart from his smile. Or, rather, how he smiled at her—warm and full-armed, like the embrace from a long-absent friend, without the slightest trace of fakeness or concealed motive. His was the most open face she’d ever seen in her life. Concomitant with these sensations, all delivered within a split second, was a thought, seemingly originating not in her mind but from the center of her torso and radiating out to the ends of each nerve, inexplicable in its suddenness and surety. A thought that children and very young people might have, but never middle-aged adults, especially one with a divorce behind her and the conviction that she already knew the world and what it was able to offer. But there it was, undeniably, the thought: I’m on a great adventure.”
― Ray Smith, The Magnolia That Bloomed Unseen

“I barely managed to do the small talk—the what-do-you-do, the where-are-you-from, the what-neighborhood, the what-college, the despair of trying to explain oneself.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Don't waste time defending yourself to people who don't need a reason not to like you. Treat your time and energy like the commodities they are.”
― Andrena Sawyer

“We should try to explain ourselves only to those who value us in their life.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“She didn’t mean anything by it,' the markhor explained like how racism is perpetuated and exonerated through faulty reasoning”
― J.S. Mason, A Dragon, A Pig, and a Rabbi Walk into a Bar...and other Rambunctious Bites