Norah Vincent

“The feminist establishment has made choice a woman's issue. The Christian right has made life a religious issue. Both have made loyalty crucial. If you're pro-woman, you're pro-choice. If you're pro-God, you're pro-life. But this is a false dichotomy.”

“Publishers and writers are desperate to cash in on the latest craze, be it baseball, the founding fathers or jihad. Their livelihoods depend on it.”

“Motherhood is more than a biological imperative.”

“Of course, Al Qaeda has no more to do with Islam than Jim Jones had to do with Christianity. And it is no more a bona fide terrorist organization than was Charles Manson's family.”

“Gay men must bear the responsibility for the spread of AIDS.”

“I was always asking myself why. Why am I feeling this? Thinking that if I knew the cause I could find the cure. But of course there was no reasonable why, at least not in the present. I was awash in an accumulation of past feelings and future dreads, all similar, at least as far as my brain was concerned, and so, lumped together as one. But nobody can handle a lifetime of experience in one moment. That's why depression crushes you.”

“The candidates who get themselves elected are illusionists and prevaricators of the first order. We expect this of them. They're a reflection of us, and they won't get any nobler until we do.”

“It should go without saying, of course, that anything a journalist writes about any person, public or private, must have a verifiable basis in fact.”

“Incidental consequences are often unpleasant; the kinds of reactions you can expect when you say something asinine or unpopular in public.”

“To me, woman-to-woman introductions often seem fake and cold, full of limp gentility.”