Norah Vincent Quotes

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“When we're in the presence of another person, there is always a mask, 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 spouses, our family, our confessor, or perfect strangers, amounts to chitchat all the same.

Or at best, a crack audition for that juiciest of all parts were literally dying to play: ourselves.

But alone, f*ckin' a-lone we're genius.”