117 Quotes by Caroline Knapp

Things – identifiable objects, products, goals with clear labels and price tags, men you’ve known for five minutes – make such a handy repository for hungers, such an easy mask for other desires, and such a ready cure for the feelings of edgy discontent that emerge when other desires are either thwarted or unnamed.

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

Over the years I’ve come to think of memories as tiny living things, microorganisms that swim through the brain until they’ve found the right compartment in which to settle down and rest. If the compartment isn’t available, if there’s no proper label for the memory, it takes up residence somewhere else, gets lodged in a corner and gnaws at you periodically, cropping up at odd times, or in dreams.

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.

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. Life without Lucille? Unfathomable, to contemplate how quiet and still my home would be, and how much less laughter there’d be, and how unanchored I’d feel without her presence, the simple constancy of it.

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.

Was he smart enough? Introspective enough? Was it just enough to love him, or should I attach myself to someone who seemed farther ahead of me, someone smarter and more ambitious than me, who’d be sure to carry me along into the version of adulthood I thought I should be striving for?

Why do I find the fantasy – husband, family, kids – exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?

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.