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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Caroline Knapp Quotes

Census figures be damned: If you choose to be alone, you’re destined to spend a certain amount of time wondering why.

– Caroline Knapp

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.’

– Caroline Knapp

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.

– Caroline Knapp

Anorexia is a response to cultural images of the female body – waiflike, angular – that both capitulates to the ideal and also mocks it, strips away all the ancillary signs of sexuality, strips away breasts and hips and butt and leaves in their place a garish caricature, a cruel cartoon of flesh and bone.

– Caroline Knapp

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

– Caroline Knapp

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.

– Caroline Knapp

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.

– Caroline Knapp

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.

– Caroline Knapp

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.

– Caroline Knapp

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.

– Caroline Knapp

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.

– Caroline Knapp

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

– Caroline Knapp

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.

– Caroline Knapp

Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.

– Caroline Knapp

Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.

– Caroline Knapp

Women are actually superb at math; they just happen to engage in their own variety of it, an intricate personal math in which desires are split off from one another, weighed, balance, traded, assessed.

– Caroline Knapp

Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.

– Caroline Knapp

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 human relationships. If someone acted that way to you, you’d feel claustrophobic pretty quickly. It’s a boundary violation.

– Caroline Knapp

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.

– Caroline Knapp

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.

– 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?

– Caroline Knapp

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.

– Caroline Knapp

Me, I walk along and feel quietly defensive, a recluse in the Land of We. That’s quite the loaded word, ‘we.’

– Caroline Knapp

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.

– Caroline Knapp

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

– Caroline Knapp

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.

– Caroline Knapp