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 More Quotes by Caroline Knapp More Quotes From 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 healthy dog thinking 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 attachment animal thinking 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 short-life dog mother Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many. Caroline Knapp alas merry lost I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms. Caroline Knapp relief solitude self 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 labels self culture 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 wish wonder desire 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 addiction romance jobs 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 lovely missing giving 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 ruining-everything way fall 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 achievement teacher order 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 risk energy world When you quit drinking you stop waiting. Caroline Knapp sobriety drinking inspirational The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind. Caroline Knapp clear things-in-life mind 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 psychics cake order 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 levels communication culture 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 and beyond, the imagery around us would only grow more specific, more pummeling, more insidious. Caroline Knapp girl air school Consumerism thrives on emotional voids. Caroline Knapp consumerism void emotional 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 narrators self order Alcoholism is the disease of more. Caroline Knapp alcoholism alcohol disease
