Quotes from Norah Vincent

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.

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 be the hardest part to swallow) that women have been codeterminers in the system, at times as invested and active as men themselves in making and keeping men in their role.

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't in despair about the human condition.

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 particulars, to see and treat women as equals in every respect, he is on the other hand often still expected to be traditional at the same time, to treat a lady like a lady, to lead the way and pick up the check.

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.

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 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. Fuckin A- ALONE were genius.