All Caroline Knapp Quotes
- American companies spend more than $200 billion each year hacking women's bodies into bits and pieces, urging comparisons between self and other, linking value to… Air
- 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… Began
- 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… Budget
- 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,… Allow
- 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… Appear
- 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… Bumping
- 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… Completely
- 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… Attachment
- 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… All
- The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind. Clear
- Anorexia is a response to cultural images of the female body - waiflike, angular - that both capitulates to the ideal and also mocks it,… All
- Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts. Black
- Mastery over the body - its impulses, its needs, its size - is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty… Beauty
- 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… All
- 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… Adulthood
- 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.… Agenda
- 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… Accumulation
- 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… Appetite
- 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… Begin
- 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… Allowed
- Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug. Corrosive
- When you quit drinking you stop waiting. Drinking
- To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find. Akin
- 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… Always Gives
- Consumerism thrives on emotional voids. Consumerism