Caroline Knapp Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Life had this unmoored quality, full of voids and barely acknowledged yearnings, and if I'd made a list of things I wanted desperately at the time, it would have included the most elusive items. Love with ambivalence. Family members who won't leave. Intimacy that's not scary, that doesn't require a lot of anesthesia. — Caroline Knapp

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

That these mandates exist is hardly news, but their cumulative effect on women's lives tends to be examined through a fragmented lens, one-pathology-at-a-time, the eating disorder lit on the self-help shelves separated from the books on women's troubled relationships with men, the books on compulsive shopping separated from the books on female sexuality, the books on culture and media separated from the books on female psychology. Take your pick, choose your demon: Women Who Love Too Much in one camp, Women Who Eat Too Much in another, Women Who Shop Too Much in a third. In fact, the camps are not so disparate, and the question of appetite - specifically the question of what happens to the female appetite when it's submerged and rerouted - is the thread that binds them together. One woman's tub of cottage cheese is another's maxed-out MasterCard; one woman's soul-murdering love affair is another's frenzied eating binge. — Caroline Knapp

The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind. — Caroline Knapp

Dogs possess a quality that's rare among humans
the ability to make you feel valued just by being you
and it was something of a miracle to me to be on the receiving end of all that acceptance. The dog didn't care what I looked like, or what I did for a living, or what a train wreck of a life I'd led before I got her, or what we did from day to day. She just wanted to be with me, and that awareness gave me a singular sensation of delight. I kept her in a crate at night until she was housebroken, and in the mornings I'd let her up onto the bed with me. She'd writhe with joy at that. She'd wag her tail and squirm all over me, lick my neck and face and eyes and ears, get her paws all tangled in my braid, and I'd just lie there, and I'd feel those oceans of loss from my past ebbing back, ebbing away, and I'd hear myself laugh out loud. — 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. — Caroline Knapp

In between, for five or ten minutes at a stretch, the real version, tense and dishonest and uncertain. I rarely allowed her to emerge for long. Work - all that productive, effective, focused work - kept her distracted and submerged all day. And drink - anesthetizing and constant - kept her too numb to feel at night. — Caroline Knapp

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

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

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

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

To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find. — Caroline Knapp

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

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

The kinds of roles dogs fill can be hard to come by in human relationships. We touch the dog or the pet at whim. There is a lack of self-consciousness and a fluidity to it that is absent from most human relationships. If someone acted that way to you, you'd feel claustrophobic pretty quickly. It's a boundary violation. — Caroline Knapp

So it persists, for many of us, hunger channeled into some internal circuitry of longing, routed this way and that, emerging in a thousand different forms. The diet form, the romance form, the addiction form, the overriding hunger for this purchase or that job, this relationship or that one. Hunger may be insatiable by nature, it may be fathomless, but our will to fill it, our often blind tenacity in the face of it, can be extraordinary. — Caroline Knapp

When you quit drinking you stop waiting. — Caroline Knapp

Census figures be damned: If you choose to be alone, you're destined to spend a certain amount of time wondering why. — Caroline Knapp

One thing I've noticed since I quit drinking is that a person usually has two or three sets of impulses scratching away at some internal door at any given time. If you're sober
if you're alert, and paying attention to those impulses, and not yielding to the instinct to anesthetize them
you can receive a lot of guidance about where to go, what to do next in life. — Caroline Knapp

You hide behind the professional persona all day; then you leave the office and hide behind the drink. — Caroline Knapp

But then the wine came, one glass and then a second glass. And somewhere during that second drink, the switch was flipped. The wine gave me a melting feeling, a warm light sensation in my head, and I felt like safety itself had arrived in that glass, poured out from the bottle and allowed to spill out between us. — Caroline Knapp

Time I wanted to explain the perils of growing — 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. — Caroline Knapp

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

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

Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint. — Caroline Knapp

We did not learn how to feel or experience our bodies, how to appreciate our own strengths, how to value or respect or understand the packages we came in. Instead, we learned how to look at them, to pair sexuality with desirability, to measure the worth of our bodies by their capacity to elicit admiration from others. — Caroline Knapp

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

Consumerism thrives on emotional voids. — Caroline Knapp

Cats are narcissistic. Their needs come before ours. They don't understand the word "No." They carry themselves with that aloof, arrogant sense of perpetual entitlement, they will jump up and insinuate themselves wherever they please
on your lap, on your newspaper, on your computer keyboard
and they really couldn't care less how their behavior affects the people in their lives. I've had boyfriends like this; who needs such behavior in a housepet? — Caroline Knapp

On the broad spectrum of solitude, I lean toward the extreme end: I work alone, as well as live alone, so I can pass an entire day without uttering so much as a hello to another human being. Sometimes a day's conversation consists of only five words, uttered at the local Starbucks: 'Large coffee with milk, please.' — Caroline Knapp

Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you're both aware and unaware of it almost all the time, all you know is you'd die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It's a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming. — Caroline Knapp

Cats ... are like four-legged poster children for OCD. — Caroline Knapp

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

I loved the way drink made me feel, and I loved it's special power of deflection, it's ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness of self and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings. I loved the sounds of drink: the slide of a cork as it eased out of a wine bottle, the distinct glug-glug of booze pouring into a glass, the clatter of ice cubes in a tumbler. I loved the rituals, the camaraderie of drinking with others, the warming, melting feeling of ease and courage it gave me. — Caroline Knapp

When you love somebody, or something, it's amazing how willing you are to overlook the flaws. — 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. — Caroline Knapp

You're the nice, quiet alcoholic. The good intellectual alcoholic. — 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. — 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. — Caroline Knapp

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

Insight," he said, "is almost always a rearrangement of fact. — Caroline Knapp

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

Things - identifiable objects, products, goals with clear labels and price tags, men you've known for five minutes - make such a handy repository for hungers, such an easy mask for other desires, and such a ready cure for the feelings of edgy discontent that emerge when other desires are either thwarted or unnamed. — 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. — 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. — Caroline Knapp

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

When you're starving or wrapped up in a cycle of binge-ing-and-purging, or sexually obsessed with (someone), it is very hard to think about anything else, very hard to see the larger picture of options that is your life, very hard to consider what else you might need or want or fear were you not so intently focused on one crushing passion. I sat in my room every night, with rare exceptions, for three and a half years ... — Caroline Knapp

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

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

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

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

Anyone who's ever shifted from general affection and enthusiasm for a lover to outright obsession knows what I mean: the relationship is just there occupying a small corner of your heart, and then you wake up one morning and some undefinable tide has turned forever and you can't go back. You need it; it's a central part of who you are. — Caroline Knapp

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

Beneath my own witty, profession facade were oceans of fear, whole rivers of self-doubt. — Caroline Knapp

The dog's agenda is simple, fathomable, overt: I want. I want to go out, come in, eat something, lie here, play with that, kiss you. There are no ulterior motives with a dog, no mind games, no second-guessing, no complicated negotiations or bargains, and no guilt trips or grudges if a request is denied. — 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. — Caroline Knapp

There's something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia that disabuses you of the belief in the externals, shows you that strength and 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 if it's painful and you're afraid. — Caroline Knapp

Me, I walk along and feel quietly defensive, a recluse in the Land of We. That's quite the loaded word, 'we.' — Caroline Knapp

Something is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be ... There is something fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings. — Caroline Knapp

I'd go to a party and promise Michael I wouldn't drink too much. He'd plead: "Just take it easy, okay? Watch yourself," and I'd swear: "I won't. I don't want to get too drunk." I'd mean that, of course, and I'd start out by measuring myself: one glass of wine the first half hour, one glass the second, and so on. But then something would snap, some uncontrollable process would kick in, and all of a sudden it would be two or three hours later and I'd be on my sixth or tenth or God knows what glass of wine, and I'd be plastered. I couldn't account for it, couldn't explain it, couldn't even rationalize it, although I struggled mightily to. I seemed to get drunk, blind drunk, against my will. — Caroline Knapp

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

Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many. — Caroline Knapp

As a journalist in Providence, I was particularly drawn toward stories about women's issues: I wrote about discrimination, abortion, violence against women. I wrote about women's health, sexism in the media, cultural imagery. I even wrote about women (other women) with eating disorders. And quietly, privately, I starved myself half to death. There you have it: intellectual belief without the correlary of emotional roots; feminist power understood in the mind but not known, somehow, in the body. — 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. — Caroline Knapp

When you study a dog you love, you find beauty in every small detail, and so it is with Lucille: I have become enchanted by the small asymmetrical whorls of white fur on either side of her chest, and by her tail, which she carries in a high confident curve, and by her eyes, which are watchful and intelligent, the color of chestnuts. — 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

Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim. — Caroline Knapp

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

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

I don't think you can get really out of anorexia (or any addiction, for that matter) until you simply have no other choice, until the sense that your back's against the wall grows too strong and too irrefutable, until you are simply in too much pain - too desperate and deeply bored and unhappy - to go on. — Caroline Knapp

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

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

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

For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same manner, at exactly the same times. — Caroline Knapp

What we want, of course, what lies in the cupboard marked 'important,' is connection, love: If the deepest source of human hunger had a name, that would be it; if the boxes of constraint in which so many women live could be smashed to bits, that would be the tool, the sledgehammer that shatters emptiness and uncovers the hope buried beneath it. — Caroline Knapp

And so I was scared. I was scared of my own sexual hunger, which felt so secretive and uncharted, and I was scared of the sexual hunger of boys, which felt so vivid and overt, and I was terribly uncertain of the relationships between sex and power and value, which seemed so merged and hard to tease apart. In the midst of all that, I didn't exactly loathe my body, or feel ashamed of it, but I was deeply ashamed of my fear, which felt disabling and immature and woefully, painfully uncool, a terrible secret, evidence of some profound failing and ignorance on my part. Other girls, or so I imagined, knew what to do, how to use their power, how to derive pleasure from it, and in contrast, I felt not only freakish but isolated, as though I was standing outside a vital, defining loop. — 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? — Caroline Knapp

I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms. — Caroline Knapp

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

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

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

The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetite - on calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steel - keeps the larger, more fearsome questions of desire blurred and out of focus. American women spend approximately $1 million every hour on cosmetics. This may or may not say something about female vanity, but it certainly says something about female energy, where it is and is not focused. Easier to worry about the body than the soul, easier to fit the self into the narrow slots of identity our culture offers to women than to create one ... that allows for the expression of all passions, the satisfaction of all appetites. The great preoccupation with things like food and shopping and appearance, in turn, is less of a genuine focus on hunger - indulging it, understanding it, making decisions about it - than it is a monumental distraction from hunger. — Caroline Knapp

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

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

Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts. — 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

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

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

I once heard a woman who'd lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue, and without the dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I'd amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give us, dogs can introduce us to several colors, with names like wildness and nurturance and trust and joy. — Caroline Knapp

Love - the desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incomplete - is the constant on the continuum of hunger, it's what links the anorexic to the garden-variety dieter, it's the persistent pulse of need and yearning behind the reach for food, for sex, for something. — Caroline Knapp

In one of the largest surveys of its kind to date, nearly 30,000 women told researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine that they'd rather lose weight than attain any other goal, a figure that alone suggests just how complicated the issue of appetite can be for women. This is the primary female striving? The appetite to lose appetite?
In fact, I suspect the opposite is true: that the primary, underlying striving among many women at the start of the millennium is the appetite for appetite: a longing to feel safe and secure enough to name one's true appetites and worthy and powerful enough to get them satisfied. — Caroline Knapp

The key, I suppose, has less to do with insight than with willingness, the former being relatively useless without the latter. — Caroline Knapp

Addiction to alcohol is also a neurological phenomenon, the result of a complex set of molecular alterations that take place in the brain when it's excessively and repeatedly exposed to the drug. The science of addiction is complicated, but the basic idea is fairly straightforward: alcohol appears to wreak havoc on the brain's natural systems of craving and reward, compromising the functioning of the various neurotransmitters and proteins that create feelings of well-being. — Caroline Knapp

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

Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so. — Caroline Knapp