Norah Vincent Quotations

They took people at face value. If you did your job or held up your end, and treated them with the passing respect they accorded you, you were all right.

It's not the timbre but the intonation. You're a questioner. You don't have the sense that you know exactly what you're talking about.

It was mad. It was like changing the channel, or going to a foreign country where the customs are highlighted because they're not your customs.

As you will see, being Ned was often an uncomfortable and alienating experience, and far from finding myself in him, I usually felt kept from myself in some elemental way.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.