Top 66 Caroline Knapp Quotes
#1. Me, I walk along and feel quietly defensive, a recluse in the Land of We. That's quite the loaded word, 'we.'
Caroline Knapp
#2. 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.
Caroline Knapp
#4. I walk into a health club locker room and feel an immediate impulse toward scrutiny, the kneejerk measuring of self against other: 'That one has great thighs, this one's gained weight, who's thin, who's fat, how do I compare?'
Caroline Knapp
#5. Beneath my own witty, profession facade were oceans of fear, whole rivers of self-doubt.
Caroline Knapp
#6. It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.
Caroline Knapp
#7. 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?
Caroline Knapp
#8. Cats ... are like four-legged poster children for OCD.
Caroline Knapp
#9. Tiny slices, no frosting, forty-five minutes on the StairMaster: These are the conditions, variations on a theme of vigilance and self-restraint that I've watched women dance to all my life, that I've danced to myself instinctively and still have to work to resist.
Caroline Knapp
#10. For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same manner, at exactly the same times.
Caroline Knapp
#11. When I drank, the part that felt dangerous and needy grew bright and strong and real. The part that coveted love kicked into gear. The yes grew louder than the no.
Caroline Knapp
#14. When you hear nothing about the body, he suggests, you stop listening to it, and feeling it; you stop experiencing it as a worthy, integrated entity.
Caroline Knapp
#15. To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.
Caroline Knapp
#16. Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so.
Caroline Knapp
#17. Who has the best features? This was a little game, conducted several times and always with the same results, in seventh grade, the time when so many of life's little horrors begin.
Caroline Knapp
#18. I've always walked around with the sense that the world is not a safe place. I didn't get the spontaneous gene or the adventure one, really. After going through the day with its stresses, when I shut that door at night, I don't have to deal with anything but dinner, 'E.R.' and my bathrobe.
Caroline Knapp
#19. The underlying questions of appetite, after all, are formidable - What would satisfy? How much do you need, and of what? What are the true passions, the real hungers behind the ostensible goals of beauty or slenderness?
Caroline Knapp
#20. 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.
Caroline Knapp
#21. Lack of leadership can have fearsome consequences. A dog's mental health, after all, depends to a large degree on leadership: dogs get enormously distressed when they think no one is in charge. Accordingly, it's not only nonsensical to fail to establish rules and limits with a dog ... but cruel.
Caroline Knapp
#22. 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.
Caroline Knapp
#23. I go to a restaurant with a group of women and pray that we can order lunch without falling into the semi-covert business of collective monitoring, in which levels of intake and restraint are aired, compared, noticed: 'What are you getting? Is that all you're having? A salad? Oh, please.'
Caroline Knapp
#24. 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.
Caroline Knapp
#25. 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
#26. Insight," he said, "is almost always a rearrangement of fact.
Caroline Knapp
#27. There is a particular whir of agitation about female hunger, a low-level thrumming of shoulds and shouldn'ts and can'ts and wants that can be so chronic and familiar it becomes a kind of feminine Muzak, easy to dismiss, or to tune out altogether, even if you're actively participating in it.
Caroline Knapp
#28. 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.
Caroline Knapp
#29. Your needs are overwhelming? You can't depend on yourself or others to meet them? You don't even know what they are? Then need nothing.
Caroline Knapp
#30. You hide behind the professional persona all day; then you leave the office and hide behind the drink.
Caroline Knapp
#31. A love story. Yes: this is a love story.
It's about passion, sensual pleasure, deep pulls, lust, fears, yearning hungers. It's about needs so strong they're crippling. It about saying goodbye to something you can't fathom living without.
Caroline Knapp
#32. The clothes are different: pre-dog, I used to be very finicky and self-conscious about how I looked; now I schlep around in the worst clothing - big heavy boots, baggy old sweaters, a hooded down parka from L.L. Bean that makes me look like an astronaut.
Caroline Knapp
#33. You're the nice, quiet alcoholic. The good intellectual alcoholic.
Caroline Knapp
#34. Hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even though it's painful and you're afraid.
Caroline Knapp
#35. Was he smart enough? Introspective enough? Was it just enough to love him, or should I attach myself to someone who seemed farther ahead of me, someone smarter and more ambitious than me, who'd be sure to carry me along into the version of adulthood I thought I should be striving for?
Caroline Knapp
#36. The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.
Caroline Knapp
#37. For a long time, when it's working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we are. In some ways the dynamic is simple: alcohol makes everything better, until it makes everything worse.
Caroline Knapp
#38. 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
#39. Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.
Caroline Knapp
#40. 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.
Caroline Knapp
#42. Why do I find the fantasy - husband, family, kids - exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?
Caroline Knapp
#43. Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.
Caroline Knapp
#44. My recipe for bliss on a Friday night consists of a 'New York Times' crossword puzzle and a new episode of 'Homicide;' Saturdays and Sundays are oriented around walks in the woods with the dog, human companion in tow some of the time but not always.
Caroline Knapp
#45. You'll reach into your wallet to brandish a photograph of a new puppy, and a friend will say, 'Oh, no - not pictures.'
Caroline Knapp
#46. When you love somebody, or something, it's amazing how willing you are to overlook the flaws.
Caroline Knapp
#47. Dogs have such short life spans, it's like a concentrated version of a human life. When they get older, they become much more like our mothers. They wait for us, watch out for us, are completely fascinated by everything we do.
Caroline Knapp
#48. Academic achievement was something I'd always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got them in order to sew up approval.
Caroline Knapp
#49. These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake - add five hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem - and the feelings behind them are anything but vain or shallow.
Caroline Knapp
#50. I'm still prone to periods of isolation, still more fearful of the world out there and more averse to pleasure and risk than I'd like to be; I still direct more energy toward controlling and minimizing appetites than toward indulging them.
Caroline Knapp
#51. Women are actually superb at math; they just happen to engage in their own variety of it, an intricate personal math in which desires are split off from one another, weighed, balance, traded, assessed.
Caroline Knapp
#52. Mastery over the body - its impulses, its needs, its size - is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty is to risk desirability, and to risk desirability is to risk entitlement to sexuality and love and self-esteem.
Caroline Knapp
#53. Census figures be damned: If you choose to be alone, you're destined to spend a certain amount of time wondering why.
Caroline Knapp
#54. 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.
Caroline Knapp
#55. Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.
Caroline Knapp
#56. 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
#57. All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.
Caroline Knapp
#58. A lot of people, quite frankly, think intense attachments to animals are weird and suspect, the domain of people who can't quite handle attachments to humans.
Caroline Knapp
#59. 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.
Caroline Knapp
#60. The key, I suppose, has less to do with insight than with willingness, the former being relatively useless without the latter.
Caroline Knapp
#61. Of course, the problem with self-transformation is that after a while, you don't know which version of yourself to believe in, which one is true.
Caroline Knapp
#62. I eat breakfast pretty much 'round the clock - muffins in the morning, scones for lunch, cereal at night - which may be odd but is also oddly satisfying, if only because the choice is my own.
Caroline Knapp
#63. Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.
Caroline Knapp
#64. I saw my parents as model grown-ups, and their manner, their silence, informed my sense of what adulthood looked and felt like. Grown-ups behaved rationally and calmly. Grown-ups worked during the day and came home at night and sat down for drinks and passed the evening quietly.
Caroline Knapp
#65. The freedom to choose ... means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.
Caroline Knapp
#66. I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.
Caroline Knapp
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