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

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

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...

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, eve...

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 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 barg...

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 wo...

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 o...

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 est...

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

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 abo...

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 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

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...

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

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

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

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 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

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

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-brushed ideals, and as the girls in my seventh-grade class graduated to high school...

Caroline Knapp

Author Bio

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