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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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Caroline Knapp
Age: 43 †
Born: 1959
Born: January 1
Died: 2002
Died: January 1
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Always
Achievement
Sought
Parents
Pleased
Teacher
Approval
Parent
Grades
Order
Academic
Form
Reward
Something
Teachers
Good
Rewards

More quotes by Caroline Knapp

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American companies spend more than $200 billion each year hacking women's bodies into bits and pieces, urging comparisons between self and other, linking value to air-brushed ideals, and as the girls in my seventh-grade class graduated to high school and beyond, the imagery around us would only grow more specific, more pummeling, more insidious.
Caroline Knapp
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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.
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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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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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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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Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.
Caroline Knapp
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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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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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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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To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek in the bottle, you find.
Caroline Knapp
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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.
Caroline Knapp
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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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It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.
Caroline Knapp
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Cats ... are like four-legged poster children for OCD.
Caroline Knapp
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When you quit drinking you stop waiting.
Caroline Knapp
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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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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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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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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
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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.
Caroline Knapp