Norah Vincent Quotes

United States, Writer
September 20, 1968

Norah Vincent is an American writer. She attended Williams College, where she graduated with a BA in philosophy in 1990. Vincent was a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a quarterly columnist on politics and culture for the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine The Advocate. She has also been a columnist for The Village Voice and Salon.com. Her writing has appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, the New York Post, The Washington Post and many more periodicals around the country.

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.

Norah Vincent
- Boy
- Feels
- Sweetness
People see weakness in a woman and they want to help. They see weakness in a man and they want to stamp it out.

Norah Vincent
- Help
- Weakness
- Stamp

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.

Norah Vincent
- Sense
- Talking
- Intonation
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.

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

Norah Vincent
- Happy
- Well
- Boots
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.

Norah Vincent
- Men
- Care
- Esteem
Is this level of athletic competition the ultimate distraction from real life? Or is it a form of prayer?

Norah Vincent
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.

Norah Vincent
- Respect
- Value
- Right

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

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

Norah Vincent
- Woman
- Being
- Privilege