explain oneself

Idioms  

1. Clarify what one has said or done, as in If you have a few minutes, I'll try to explain myself . [First half of 1600s]

2. Demand or give an explanation or excuse for something wrong one has done. For example, You're three hours late—can you explain yourself?

---

Example Sentences

Pendleton claims for his art the privilege — the necessity — that the French Caribbean scholar Édouard Glissant called the right to opacity: to not be legible, to not have to explain oneself.

From New York Times

“And the consequence for not complying is international criticism. And the need to explain oneself.”

From Washington Post

More often than not, this ends up with over-defended stories that attempt to explain motives and intentions that are now long in the past, and therefore might be accurately remembered but are, more often than not, invented under obligation to explain oneself or else to retrospectively attempt to reenter that pure space where one was a servant of and a contributor to, with all one has got, the mechanism of a work of fiction.

From The New Yorker

How does one explain oneself to the neighbors, after all?

From New York Times

If one has succeeded in explaining oneself in a book a preface is unnecessary, and if one has failed to explain oneself in the book, it is still more unnecessary to explain oneself in a preface.

From Project Gutenberg