Caroline Knapp quotes

I am shy by nature, a person who's always found something burdensome about human interaction and who probably always will, at least to some degree. (Caroline Knapp)
When you quit drinking you stop waiting. View quote
Caroline Knapp
For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same manner, at exactly the same times. View quote
Caroline Knapp
The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind. View quote
Caroline Knapp
All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go. View quote
Caroline Knapp
The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin. View quote
Caroline Knapp
Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many. View quote
Caroline Knapp
Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment. View quote
Caroline Knapp
To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find. View quote
Caroline Knapp
Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts. View quote
Caroline Knapp
I'm 38 and I'm single, and I'm having my most intense and gratifying relationship with a dog. But we all learn about love in different ways, and this way happens to be mine. (Caroline Knapp)
By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes. View quote
Caroline Knapp
Before you open the lunch menu or order that cheeseburger or consider eating the cake with the frosting intact, haul out the psychic calculator and start tinkering with the budget. View quote
Caroline Knapp
Consumerism thrives on emotional voids. View quote
Caroline Knapp
When you love somebody, or something, it's amazing how willing you are to overlook the flaws. View quote
Caroline Knapp
Surely, it's one of terrorism's intended effects, to literally stun our morale, to blow up strength and will along with buildings, and the reaction is hard to counter. View quote
Caroline Knapp
Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way. View quote
Caroline Knapp
Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint. View quote
Caroline Knapp
What is this drive to be thinner, prettier, better dressed, other? Who exactly is this other and what does she look like beyond the jacket she's wearing or the food she's not eating? What might we be doing, thinking, feeling about if we didn't think about body image, ever? View quote
Caroline Knapp
I don't think that the world would be a better place if everyone owned a dog, and I don't think that all relationships between dogs and their owners are good, healthy, or enriching. View quote
Caroline Knapp
Cottage cheese is one of our culture's most visible symbols of self-denial; marketed honestly, it would appear in dairy cases with warning labels: this substance is self-punitive; ingest with caution. (Caroline Knapp)
Anorexia is a response to cultural images of the female body - waiflike, angular - that both capitulates to the ideal and also mocks it, strips away all the ancillary signs of sexuality, strips away breasts and hips and butt and leaves in their place a garish caricature, a cruel cartoon of flesh and bone. View quote
Caroline Knapp
Desires collide; the wish to eat bumping up against the wish to be thin, the desire to indulge conflicting with the injunction to restrain. Small wonder food makes a woman nervous. View quote
Caroline Knapp
Why do I find the fantasy - husband, family, kids - exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life? View quote
Caroline Knapp
Around the time I began starving, in the early eighties, the visual image had begun to supplant text as culture's primary mode of communication, a radical change because images work so differently than words: They're immediate, they hit you at levels way beneath intellect, they come fast and furious. View quote
Caroline Knapp