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Norah Vincent Quotes

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

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.

Tags: anxiety, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, healing, mental health, mental illness, recovery, sadness

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 think...

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 think...

Tags: addiction, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, depression, mental health, mental illness, ocd, recovery

About Author
Norah Mary Vincent (September 20, 1968 – July 6, 2022) was an American writer. She was a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a quarterly columnist on politics and culture for the national gay and lesbian news magazine The Advocate. She was a columnist for The Village Voice and Salon.com. Her writing appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, New York Post, The Washington Post and other periodicals. She gained particular attention in 2006 for her book Self-Made Man, detailing her experiences when she lived as a man for eighteen months.

So, the image to start. The perception of the world as it is, the phantasm, the flare of the visionary idea is flattened to a page by the male intellect. Controlled, categorized, c-a-t-a-l-o-g-u-e-d....

Norah Vincent

So, the image to start. The perception of the world as it is, the phantasm, the flare of the visionary idea is flattened to a page by the male intellect. Controlled, categorized, c-a-t-a-l-o-g-u-e-d....

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

Norah Vincent

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

Tags: mental health, psychiatry, psychology

It’s hard to position a movement when the territory is so intimate. Men, after all, can’t exactly gather on the White House lawn and demonstrate for their right to cry in public or claim their lost fa...

Norah Vincent

It’s hard to position a movement when the territory is so intimate. Men, after all, can’t exactly gather on the White House lawn and demonstrate for their right to cry in public or claim their lost fa...

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

When were in the prence of another person, there Is always a masks, even if that mask is our face. There is no escaping it. And so the vast majority of what we say to each other, whether it is to our...

Norah Vincent

When were in the prence of another person, there Is always a masks, even if that mask is our face. There is no escaping it. And so the vast majority of what we say to each other, whether it is to our...

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...

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...

Tags: coping, depression, mental illness, recovery, sadness

I was boring myself. That’s the worst part of a bad date. It makes you feel like a toad, and you keep telling yourself, I know I’m more fun than this, and I know that when I came into this café I wasn...

Norah Vincent

I was boring myself. That’s the worst part of a bad date. It makes you feel like a toad, and you keep telling yourself, I know I’m more fun than this, and I know that when I came into this café I wasn...

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

Norah Vincent

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

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

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.

Tags: fools, idiocy, jerks, men, power, relationships, society, women, women and men

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

Norah Vincent

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

Tags: depression, mental illness

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 quic...

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 quic...

And yet, she squints disapprovingly, the wretched intellect at work. Always the masculine mind interferes, sucking the magic out of sounds and shutting it into words. The very word for this, the acade...

Norah Vincent

And yet, she squints disapprovingly, the wretched intellect at work. Always the masculine mind interferes, sucking the magic out of sounds and shutting it into words. The very word for this, the acade...

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 c...

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 c...

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 mo...

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 mo...

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 wo...

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 wo...

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 a...

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 a...

Tags: depression, mental health, mental illness, recovery, sadness, trauma

If women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men are equally trapped by this warrior/minstrel complex. What’s more, while a man is expected to be modern, that is, to support feminism in all its...

Norah Vincent

If women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men are equally trapped by this warrior/minstrel complex. What’s more, while a man is expected to be modern, that is, to support feminism in all its...

Men’s healing is in women’s interest, though for women that healing will mean accepting on some level not only that men are—here is the dreaded word—victims of the patriarchy, too, but (and this will...

Norah Vincent

Men’s healing is in women’s interest, though for women that healing will mean accepting on some level not only that men are—here is the dreaded word—victims of the patriarchy, too, but (and this will...