Quotes by Caroline Knapp

About Caroline Knapp:

Caroline Knapp was an American writer and columnist whose candid best-selling memoir Drinking: A Love Story recounted her 20-year battle with alcoholism. She was the daughter of noted psychiatrist Peter H. Knapp, who did groundbreaking research into psychosomatic medicine.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

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

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

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 diete...

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 t...

Caroline Knapp

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

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,...

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

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

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 f...

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 yieldin...

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

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 o...

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 an...

Caroline Knapp

Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.

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

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...

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 ...

Caroline Knapp

Author Bio

  • NameCaroline Knapp
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornNovember 8, 1959
  • DiedJune 3, 2002
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter