117 Quotes by Caroline Knapp

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?

The underlying questions of appetite, after all, are formidable – What would satisfy? How much do you need, and of what? What are the true passions, the real hungers behind the ostensible goals of beauty or slenderness?

You’re the nice, quiet alcoholic. The good intellectual alcoholic.

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.

Sometimes I look back and think my whole adult life has been underlined with a feeling of waiting – waiting for something to happen, waiting for circumstances to change, waiting for the right man or the right job or the right shoes-and-clothes-and-haircut to swoop down from above and change me, to infuse me from the outside in with a feeling of well-being and validation and peace of mind.

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

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.

You hide behind the professional persona all day; then you leave the office and hide behind the drink.

I think the healing power of dogs has less to do with what they give us than what they bring out in us, with what their presence allows us to feel and experience.