Quotes from Caroline Knapp

Things — identifiable objects, products, goals with clear labels and price tags, men you've known for five minutes — make such a handy repository for hungers, such an easy mask for other desires, and such a ready cure for the feelings of edgy discontent that emerge when other desires are either thwarted or unnamed.

Life had this unmoored quality, full of voids and barely acknowledged yearnings, and if I'd made a list of things I wanted desperately at the time, it would have included the most elusive items. Love with ambivalence. Family members who won't leave. Intimacy that's not scary, that doesn't require a lot of anesthesia.

At heart alcoholism feels like the accumulation of dozens of such connections, dozens of tiny fears and hungers and rages, dozens of experiences and memories that collect in the bottom of your soul, coalescing over many many many drinks into a single liquid solution.

Of course, the problem with self-transformation is that after a while, you don't know which version of yourself to believe in, which one is true.

The underlying questions of appetite, after all, are formidable — What would satisfy? How much do you need, and of what? What are the true passions, the real hungers behind the ostensible goals of beauty or slenderness?

When you love somebody, or something, it's amazing how willing you are to overlook the flaws.

Beneath my own witty, profession facade were oceans of fear, whole rivers of self-doubt.

Insight," he said, "is almost always a rearrangement of fact.

That was my favorite line: I'll drink less when things get better.

Meg often slept with men she didn't want to sleep with: she didn't know how to say no. More precisely, she didn't know she was allowed to say no.

Recovering alcoholics often talk about drinking "the way they wanted to" when they were alone, drinking without the feeling of social restraint they might have had at a party or in a restaurant. There's something almost childlike about the need, and about the language we use to describe it: wanting our bottles, wanting to crawl into that dark room in our minds and curl up and be alone with our object of security.

You hide behind the professional persona all day; then you leave the office and hide behind the drink.

In between, for five or ten minutes at a stretch, the real version, tense and dishonest and uncertain. I rarely allowed her to emerge for long. Work—all that productive, effective, focused work—kept her distracted and submerged all day. And drink—anesthetizing and constant—kept her too numb to feel at night.

You're the nice, quiet alcoholic. The good intellectual alcoholic.

Liquor creates delusion. It can make your life feel full of risk and adventure, sparkling and dynamic as a rough sea under sunlight. A single drink can make you feel unstoppable, masterful, capable of solving problems that overwhelmed you just five minutes before. In fact, the opposite is true: drinking brings your life to a standstill, makes it static as rock over time.

Over the years I've come to think of memories as tiny living things, microorganisms that swim through the brain until they've found the right compartment in which to settle down and rest. If the compartment isn't available, if there's no proper label for the memory, it takes up residence somewhere else, gets lodged in a corner and gnaws at you periodically, cropping up at odd times, or in dreams.

I think the healing power of dogs has less to do with what they give us than what they bring out in us, with what their presence allows us to feel and experience.

time I wanted to explain the perils of growing

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. Life without Lucille? Unfathomable, to contemplate how quiet and still my home would be, and how much less laughter there'd be, and how unanchored I'd feel without her presence, the simple constancy of it.

lack of leadership can have fearsome consequences. A dog's mental health, after all, depends to a large degree on leadership: dogs get enormously distressed when they think no one is in charge. Accordingly, it's not only nonsensical to fail to establish rules and limits with a dog...but cruel.

Noting that adolescence is the time in a girl's life when she realizes that men have all the power and that hers can come only from consenting to become a submissive, adored object, she wrote: "Girls stop being and stop seeing.

The freedom to choose, in other words, 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.

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 though it's painful and you're afraid.

Where are the lines between satisfaction and excess, between restraint and indulgence, between pleasure and self-destruction? And why are they so difficult to find, particularly for women?