Top Caroline Knapp Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Caroline Knapp Biography

Caroline Knapp (November 8, 1959 – June 3, 2002) 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.

Read about Caroline Knapp in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Caroline Knapp Quotes

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

Black And White, Clearly, Culture, Narrative, Thrives

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.

Acceptance, Dog, Possess, Receiving, Train, Train Wrecks

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.

Anorexic, Desire, Dieter, Garden, Giving, Sex

Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint.

Disappoint, Dog, Dogs, Fantasies, Fantasy

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

Defensive, Land, Quietly, Quite, Recluse, Walks

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.

Crush, Crushing, Night, Passion, Picture, Years

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

Former, Key, Keys, Latter, Useless

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

Drawn, Pace, Relief, Rhythms, Self, Solitude

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.

Attachment, Dog, Experiencing, Falling In Love, Orbit, Ways

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.

Energy, Fearful, Risk, World

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.

Close, Giving, Human, Lovely, Missing, Thwarted

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.

Animal, Animals, Attachment, People, Quite, Thinking

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.

Achievement, Approval, Good, Order, Sought, Teacher

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.

Dog, Dogs, Guides, Needed, Places, Sort

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

Breeding, Liberates, Solitude, Way, Whim

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.

Coffee, Milk, Pass, Solitude, Spectrum, Starbucks

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.

Dog, Friday, New York, Night, Puzzle, Sundays

Alcoholism is the disease of more.

Alcohol, Alcoholism, Disease

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?

Beauty, Drive, Exactly, Inspiring, Think, Thinking

Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.

Corrosive, Drug, Integrity, Passivity Is, Pride

1