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

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

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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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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.
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The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so, this thrust into complexity exhausts.
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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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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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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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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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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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Cats ... are like four-legged poster children for OCD.
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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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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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When you quit drinking you stop waiting.
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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