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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.

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
Real
Begin
Heart
Struggle
Life
Stop
World
Waiting
Learn
Persons
Inhabit
Person
Skin
Live
Skins

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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.
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The freedom to choose...means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends the construction of a self.
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Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.
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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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Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.
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The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.
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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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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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Why do I find the fantasy - husband, family, kids - exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?
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When you quit drinking you stop waiting.
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Cats ... are like four-legged poster children for OCD.
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It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.
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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.
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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.
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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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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?
Caroline Knapp
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All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.
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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.
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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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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