Quote

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.

Caroline Knapp

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Caroline Knapp
Age: 43 †
Born: 1959
Born: January 1
Died: 2002
Died: January 1
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Humans
Short
Version
Much
Watches
Fascinated
Life
Watch
Versions
Like
Waiting
Dogs
Mother
Older
Become
Wait
Spans
Human
Dog
Concentrated
Everything
Completely
Mothers

More quotes by Caroline Knapp

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Cats ... are like four-legged poster children for OCD.
Caroline Knapp
Image
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
Image
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.
Caroline Knapp
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek in the bottle, you find.
Caroline Knapp
Image
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
Image
All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.
Caroline Knapp
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.
Caroline Knapp
Image
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.
Caroline Knapp
Image
Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.
Caroline Knapp