Caroline Knapp Quotes
The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.
All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.
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.
Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.
I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms.
Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.
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.
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.
Me, I walk along and feel quietly defensive, a recluse in the Land of We. That's quite the loaded word, 'we.
To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.
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.
It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.
When you love somebody, or something, its amazing how willing you are to overlook the flaws.
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.
Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.
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'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.
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 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.
Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.
When I drank, the part that felt dangerous and needy grew bright and strong and real. The part that coveted love kicked into gear. The yes grew louder than the no.
Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so.
The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.
You'll reach into your wallet to brandish a photograph of a new puppy, and a friend will say, 'Oh, no - not pictures.
The key, I suppose, has less to do with insight than with willingness, the former being relatively useless without the latter.
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.
For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same manner, at exactly the same times.
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.
Your needs are overwhelming? You can’t depend on yourself or others to meet them? You don’t even know what they are? Then need nothing.
