Quotes by 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 un...”

“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...”

“The great anxious focus on the minutiae of appetiteon calories and portion size and what's going into the body versus what's being expended, on shoes and hair and abs of steelkeeps the larger, more...”

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

“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...”

“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. Th...”

“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, an...”

“Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.”

“The dogs 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 secon...”

“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, t...”

“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 addi...”

“...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. ...”

“Your needs are overwhelming? You cant depend on yourself or others to meet them? You dont even know what they are? Then need nothing.”

“Lovethe 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 incompleteis the constant on the continuum of hunger, it's what...”

“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.”

“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 ...”

“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.”

“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 ...”

“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.”

“To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.”