Caroline Knapp Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

I am in love with my dog. I'm 38 and I'm single and I'm having my most intense and gratifying relationship with a dog. But we all learn about love in different ways, and this way happens to be mine.

Caroline Knapp
Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

Caroline Knapp
A lot of people, quite frankly, think intense attachments to animals are weird and suspect, the domain of people who can't quite handle attachments to humans.

Caroline Knapp
You'll reach into your wallet to brandish a photograph of a new puppy, and a friend will say, 'Oh, no - not pictures.

Caroline Knapp
I remembered the way my mother, a markedly undemonstrative woman most of the time, used to reach down and pet the dog, scratch his chest until he zoned out with contentment, eyes at half-mast.

Caroline Knapp
Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug.

Caroline Knapp
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
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
But then the wine came, one glass and then a second glass. And somewhere during that second drink, the switch was flipped. The wine gave me a melting feeling, a warm light sensation in my head, and I felt like safety itself had arrived in that glass, poured out from the bottle and allowed to spill out between us.

Caroline Knapp
The key, I suppose, has less to do with insight than with willingness, the former being relatively useless without the latter.

Caroline Knapp
There's something about sober living and sober thinking, about facing long afternoons without the numbing distraction of anesthesia that disabuses you of the belief in the externals, shows you that strength and hope come not from circumstances or the acquisition of things, but from the simple accumulation of active experience, from gritting the teeth and checking the items off the list, one by one, even if it's painful and you're afraid.

Caroline Knapp
In some ways, living with a dog is like being followed around twenty-four hours a day by a mute psychoanalyst: you get that blank screen—nonjudgmental, trusted, noncritical—but no interpretation, no words of insight or guidance, no quiet voice of reason helping you to connect the psychic dots.

Caroline Knapp
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
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.

Caroline Knapp
Feelings float up from inside — rational ones, irrational ones, ones you didn't even know you had — and attach themselves to the dog, who will not question their validity, or hold your behavior up to scrutiny, or challenge your perceptions. Freud in fur; Freud without the therapeutic agenda. In the dog's presence you are free to act — and act out — any way you want.

Caroline Knapp
When I drank, the part that felt dangerous and needy grew bright and strong and real. The part that coveted love kicked into gear. The yes grew louder than the no.

Caroline Knapp
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
If you've spent a lifetime navigating the landscape of human relationships, characterized as it can be by covertness and ambivalence and indirection, this can be an enormous relief.

Caroline Knapp
The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.

Caroline Knapp
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.

Caroline Knapp
Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so.

Caroline Knapp