“ 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
“ 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
“ 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
“ 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
“ 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 empt… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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.… 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… 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… 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… 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… 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
