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

Caroline Knapp

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Caroline Knapp
Age: 43 †
Born: 1959
Born: January 1
Died: 2002
Died: January 1
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Black
Narrative
Defined
Exhausts
Clearly
Thrives
Emotions
Narratives
Emotion
Endings
White
Thrust
Culture
Thrive
Easy
Complexity

More quotes by Caroline Knapp

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.
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To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek in the bottle, you find.
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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.
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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?
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Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
Caroline Knapp
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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.
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You'll reach into your wallet to brandish a photograph of a new puppy, and a friend will say, 'Oh, no - not pictures.
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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.
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The dog’s agenda is simple, fathomable, overt: I want. “I want to go out, come in, eat something, lie here, play with that, kiss you. There are no ulterior motives with a dog, no mind games, no second-guessing, no complicated negotiations or bargains, and no guilt trips or grudges if a request is denied.
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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.
Caroline Knapp
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Cats ... are like four-legged poster children for OCD.
Caroline Knapp
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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