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Parent blaming is a popular and convenient form of self-justification because it allows people to live less uncomfortably with their regrets and imperfections.

By far the most important distortions and confabulations of memory are those that serve to justify and explain our own lives.

…an understanding of memory and self-justification leads us to a more nuanced perspective: a person doesn’t have to be lying to be wrong.

Fake memories all ow people to forgive themselves and justify their mistakes, but sometimes at a high price: an inability to take responsibility for their lives.

…we must also be careful which memories we select to justify our lives, because we will have to live by them.

…the vast majority of couples who drift apart do so slowly, over time, in a snowballing pattern of blame and self-justification.

…misunderstanding, conflicts, personality differences, and even angry quarrels are not the assassins of love; self-justification is.

When we explain our own behavior, self-justification allows us to flatter ourselves: We give ourselves credit for our good actions but let the situation excuse the bad ones.

Thanks to the revisionist power of memory to justify our decisions, by the time many couples divorce, they can’t remember why they married.

Self-justification is the route by which ambivalence morphs into certainty, guilt into rage. The love story has become a hate book.