Words matter. These are the best Caroline Knapp Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The clothes are different: pre-dog, I used to be very finicky and self-conscious about how I looked; now I schlep around in the worst clothing – big heavy boots, baggy old sweaters, a hooded down parka from L.L. Bean that makes me look like an astronaut.
When you love somebody, or something, it’s amazing how willing you are to overlook the flaws.
I’m 38 and I’m single, and I’m having my most intense and gratifying relationship with a dog. But we all learn about love in different ways, and this way happens to be mine.
Census figures be damned: If you choose to be alone, you’re destined to spend a certain amount of time wondering why.
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.
I’ve always walked around with the sense that the world is not a safe place. I didn’t get the spontaneous gene or the adventure one, really. After going through the day with its stresses, when I shut that door at night, I don’t have to deal with anything but dinner, ‘E.R.’ and my bathrobe.
There is a particular whir of agitation about female hunger, a low-level thrumming of shoulds and shouldn’ts and can’ts and wants that can be so chronic and familiar it becomes a kind of feminine Muzak, easy to dismiss, or to tune out altogether, even if you’re actively participating in it.
The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.
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.’
Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.
For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same manner, at exactly the same times.
You’ll reach into your wallet to brandish a photograph of a new puppy, and a friend will say, ‘Oh, no – not pictures.’
I go to a restaurant with a group of women and pray that we can order lunch without falling into the semi-covert business of collective monitoring, in which levels of intake and restraint are aired, compared, noticed: ‘What are you getting? Is that all you’re having? A salad? Oh, please.’
I saw my parents as model grown-ups, and their manner, their silence, informed my sense of what adulthood looked and felt like. Grown-ups behaved rationally and calmly. Grown-ups worked during the day and came home at night and sat down for drinks and passed the evening quietly.
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.
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?
Why do I find the fantasy – husband, family, kids – exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?
Tiny slices, no frosting, forty-five minutes on the StairMaster: These are the conditions, variations on a theme of vigilance and self-restraint that I’ve watched women dance to all my life, that I’ve danced to myself instinctively and still have to work to resist.
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.
Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.
Surely, it’s one of terrorism’s intended effects, to literally stun our morale, to blow up strength and will along with buildings, and the reaction is hard to counter.
Me, I walk along and feel quietly defensive, a recluse in the Land of We. That’s quite the loaded word, ‘we.’
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.
I’ve always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake – add five hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem – and the feelings behind them are anything but vain or shallow.
Who has the best features? This was a little game, conducted several times and always with the same results, in seventh grade, the time when so many of life’s little horrors begin.
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.
Mastery over the body – its impulses, its needs, its size – is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty is to risk desirability, and to risk desirability is to risk entitlement to sexuality and love and self-esteem.
Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.
I walk into a health club locker room and feel an immediate impulse toward scrutiny, the kneejerk measuring of self against other: ‘That one has great thighs, this one’s gained weight, who’s thin, who’s fat, how do I compare?’
