29 Quotes by Norah Vincent

A lot of men's bluster is really indicating how much the esteem of women means to them, and not how little. I was surprised, too, to find that men care as much as they do.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?