Norah Vincent

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

“Sometimes, the best way to keep hate from ruling us is to strip the meaning from the words behind which it tries to hide.”

“It took MS to teach me an invaluable lesson, one that many people think has made me a conservative, but which I think has simply made me an adult: The personal is not political. Quite the contrary, the political is personal.”

“I didn't understand that there was some mental component of how you view yourself in terms of gender that's deeply embedded in your brain and that you can't just pull that out and not expect trouble.”

“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.”

“American news organizations are superior because, unlike so many other government-controlled and censored presses from China to much of the Arab world, they tell the truth - or so its members like to think. They get very upset when someone suggests otherwise.”

“Growing up in England in the late 1970s and the '80s when my father was working at the European headquarters of Ford Motor Co., I was derisively called a Yank on a daily basis and told in unprintably explicit terms to go back to my own country.”

“The first thing most people say to themselves when they're diagnosed with a serious disease is, 'Why me?' It's a knee-jerk human response, and I was no exception.”

“Isn't it curious how quickly a conservative becomes a libertarian when he's caught sinning? There's a lesson in that somewhere, if only the Christian right could bring itself to learn it.”

“There is no good, objective reason to believe that legalizing gay marriage would adversely affect traditional marriage, just as there is no good reason to believe that restricting marriage to a man and a woman would resuscitate an institution whose problems are human, not cultural.”

“For native New Yorkers and pilgrims alike, there have been few things more heartbreaking about the protracted aftermath of Sept. 11 than the garish gap in the city's famous profile, that blank, vacuous space on the horizon where the World Trade Center once so impressively stood.”

“Antidepressants are not the devil, but they are certainly not a panacea either. They were never meant to be the lazy person's spiritual aspirin, designed to make bad days a thing of the past.”

“Prozac makes you feel better by disabling those crippling doubts and inhibitions that are the hallmarks of despondency, but it often does so at the expense of your better judgment. You stop over-analyzing, but you also stop thinking things through, and that can precipitate some pretty bad behavior from otherwise mild-mannered people.”

“Defending legacy admissions is a mistake, not just because it is inconsistent with opposition to affirmative action but also because legacy admissions are indefensible.”

“There is some truth to the claim that trade publishing has become a harried, assembly-line operation with its head on the block.”

“Manhood is a leaden mythology riding on the shoulders of every man.”

“The liberal special-interest groups that squeal most loudly for their rights are the same ones that decry the military spending that guarantees those rights.”

“Men often project a sometimes overbearing egotism and entitlement because that's what you have to do when you're not allowed to show weakness and need.”

“There are at least two circumstances under which journalists have both a right and an obligation to publish details about a public person's private life: first, if the behaviors or events in question are illegal or immoral; and second, if it can be shown that the subject lied publicly about them.”

“Good and evil exist and can be meaningfully distinguished from each other by simple criteria.”