Norah Vincent Quotes & Sayings

Think of what's scary in a movie ... The unseen, the imagined, is always more frightening than what's graphically portrayed.The same holds true in your head. Face your fear, step into it, look at it head-on and it will diminish in stature, lose its hold on your imagination. But run, and it'll grow wings, breather fire, and fly after you. — Norah Vincent

That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that. — Norah Vincent

You want to be happy? You want to be well? Then put your boots on. — Norah Vincent

It was the woman's job to be on the defensive, because past experience had taught her to be. It was the guy's job to be on the offensive, because he had no choice. It was that or never meet at all. — Norah Vincent

She waited in the ward thinking what I had thought in the same circumstances, that this was not a place much designated to help people like us, the semi-talented, sometime wayward overachievers who got a little carried away with the X-ACTO knife when we got a bad grade, or otherwise tripped on the latter of betterment. — Norah Vincent

I could live alone forever if I just had a view of the sea. — Norah Vincent

I was never mean to him, but I participated heartily when the guys teased him. — Norah Vincent

Adeline, who is the girl that she once was, the bright Victorian girl shut behind dark paneled doors with her thirteen, fifteen, eighteen years of life and a Greek lexicon. She is the girl stopped in time who could not speak or feel at the side of her dead mother's bed. She keeps the cold, clear information of those days, unclouded by revision or the lies of age. — Norah Vincent

Despair was strength. Despair was the scab and the scar. The walled city in a time of plague. A closed fortification. A sure thing, because it was always safer, less painful to stop trying than it was to repeatedly try and fail. Failure-disappointment-was a poison in my blood. Despair was the antidote. — Norah Vincent

There is a whole hell of a lot of knowledge about the (expletive removed) human condition that we are not ready for. — Norah Vincent

There is a time in a boy's life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone. — Norah Vincent

This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself. — Norah Vincent

People see weakness in a woman and they want to help. They see weakness in a man and they want to stamp it out — Norah Vincent

Ditto for the stereotype about men monopolizing conversations. Like Sasha, many of my dates - even the more passive ones - did most of the talking. I listened to them talk literally for hours about the most minute, mind-numbing details of their personal lives; men they were still in love with, men they had divorced, roommates and coworkers they hated, childhoods they were loath to remember, yet somehow found the energy to recount ad nauseam. Listening to them was like undergoing a slow frontal lobotomy. I sat there stunned by the social ineptitude of people to whom it never seemed to occur that no one, much less a first date, would have any interest in enduring this ordeal. — Norah Vincent

I was always asking myself why. Why am I feeling this? Thinking that if I knew the cause I could find the cure. But of course there was no reasonable why, at least not in the present. I was awash in an accumulation of past feelings and future dreads, all similar, at least as far as my brain was concerned, and so, lumped together as one. But nobody can handle a lifetime of experience in one moment. That's why depression crushes you. — Norah Vincent

Gratification kills desire. And constant gratification kills it permanently — Norah Vincent

Women and men communicate differently, often on entirely different planes. But just as men have failed us, we have failed them. It has been one of our great collective female shortcomings to presume that whatever we do not perceive simply isn't there, or that whatever is not communicated in our language is not intelligible speech. — Norah Vincent

We tend to think of happiness (and by happiness I also mean health or overall well-being)as a gift, and sometimes it is, a pure gratuity. But most of the time it comes about because you've done the work, prepared the ground to allow it in or tended it carefully once it has arrived. You have to practice happiness the way you practice the piano, commit to it the way you commit to going to the gym. — Norah Vincent

Dating women was the hardest thing I had to to as Ned, even when the women liked me and I liked them. I have never felt more vulnerable to total strangers, never more socially defenseless than in my clanking suit of borrowed armor.
But then, I guess maybe that's one of the secrets of manhood that no man tells if he can help it. Every man's armor is borrowed and ten sizes too big, and beneath it, he's naked and insecure and hoping you won't see. — Norah Vincent

He could put up a gruff front and he was no angel, but he was really just trying to hide his sensitivities so that he could hang on to them. — Norah Vincent

Normal life is nuts. It's a downhill deterioration to death no matter how you spice it along the way, and there's nothing you can do about it. Now, a sane person, when faced when that, would just plunk his ass down at the starting line, or wherever along the way this realization finally came to him, and say, "Are you kidding? I quit. I'll slide the rest of the way or sit here and smoke." It takes a true lunatic, or someone functioning with the critical apparatus of a worker bee, to keep scrabbling up that hill when he knows his destiny is dust. But that us what is required. Go on. — Norah Vincent

Like so many other high school discipline cases, he'd probably been given some hybrid cockamamie ADHD- bipolar diagnosis at a very young age and been medicated into submission for the benefit of his homeroom teacher. We've all read about them in the paper, the problem kids who get slapped with five disorders by the time they're twelve, and horse-pilled by a culture that has pathologized everything from PMS to teen angst. — Norah Vincent

If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape myself because I felt empty, and the emptiness frightened me. But obviously, I was empty because I was always running out, running away. The only way to fill the emptiness was to remain, to take up residence in myself. — Norah Vincent

Happiness is not a reward. It's a consequence. You have to work at it every day. — Norah Vincent

Is this level of athletic competition the ultimate distraction from real life? Or is it a form of prayer? — Norah Vincent

I really like being a woman ... I like it more now because I think it's more of a privilege. — Norah Vincent

Did I need medication? Or did I need someone to talk to? Someone, that is, who would do more than charge the going rate for nodding and whip out a prescription pad before the first fifty minutes were up. Was I physiologically depressed? At an innate biochemical disadvantage? Or was reaching for the pad just the way things were done because the doc had been well patronized by the drug reps and had plenty of samples in her file cabinet? — Norah Vincent

There's a big difference between tolerance and approval, and I have no right to expect or demand the latter from anyone. — Norah Vincent

I'd been at the mercy of a prick on a power trip, the kind of buttoned-up bantam rooster who gets off on control and then, when you resist him, tells you that you've got issues with control. — Norah Vincent

They would have all the same stressors still in place, and they would have no means of lessening them, because, their will, if they had amassed any in their time away, was still weak and always a quick casualty. No match for the horrors of lost chances. — Norah Vincent