Quotes from Caroline Knapp

What makes you feel empty and what makes you feel full? Who, or what, makes you feel connected or soothed or joyful? How much companionship do you need, and how much solitude? What feels right, what feels like enough? We all have to feel our way through those questions in life, and although she cannot provide the answers for me, I have the sense that Lucille is gently leading me toward them. I pick up that leash; I go forward.

I drank when I was happy and I drank when I was anxious and I drank when I was bored and I drank when I was depressed, which was often.

But isn't this what Americans do best, the pursuit of happiness reconfigured as the pursuit of stuff, the diet, the toys, the boys, the magic bullet

Of course, there is no simple answer. Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you're both aware and unaware of it almost all the time; all you know is you'd die without it

and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It's a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.

These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake —add five hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem — and the feelings behind them are anything but vain or shallow... The experience of appetite in this equation is an experience of anxiety, a burden and a risk; yielding to hunger may be permissible under certain conditions, but mostly it's something to be Earned or Monitored and Controlled.

Not long ago I heard a woman in her ninth month of sobriety say that before she quit drinking, she had only two emotions, anxiety and despair. "Now I have, like, too many to count," she said, "and some of them suck, but some of them are really, really good." Almost everyone in the room knew what she meant.

I felt small and exposed in his presence, as though my body was transparent and fragile as air, as though I might evaporate at any moment, or blow away.

He could make you feel really special that way, singularly special, as though you were a bright light in his life and he had some key to that light, a way of accessing the things about you that were real and true.

You're after something deeper than a respite from shyness, or a break from private fears and anger. So after a while you alter the equation, make it stronger and more complete. Pain+Drink=Self-Obliteration.

The knowledge that some people can have enough while you never can is the single most compelling piece of evidence for a drinker to suggest that alcoholism is, in fact, a disease, that it has powerful physiological roots, that the alcoholic's body simply responds differently to liquor than a nonalcoholic's.

Loving a dog deeply does have a cellular quality, as though the most central part of you—your whole nervous system—gets tied into the bond, into the life you create together. You do get reprogrammed: a person with a dog becomes a dog person, with all the change that implies.

In my view, dogs can be shamanistic, can be heroic and gentle and wise and enormously healing, but for the most part dogs are dogs, creatures governed by their own biological imperatives and codes of conduct, and we do both them and our relationships with them a disservice when we romanticize them.

Like so many women I know, I grew up understanding that self-worth and likeability were inextricably linked, that a sizeable portion of my value would come from nourishing others: pleasing, avoiding conflict, concealing my own needs and disappointments.

a woman's individual preoccupation with weight often serves as a mask for other, more intricate sources of discomfort, the state of one's waistline being easier to contemplate than the state of one's soul.

She had a kind of internal reserve, an astonishing capacity for self-comfort, and she handled solitude more effectively than almost anyone I knew. She could spend whole days by herself — painting, knitting, reading; losing herself in art and craft and intellect.

Drinking alone is what you do when you can't stand the feeling of living in your own skin. Boswell describes this in his Life of Johnson: "I drink alone," Johnson explains, "to get rid of myself, to send myself away. Wine makes a man better pleased with himself.

a true alcoholic is someone who's turned from a cucumber into a pickle; you can try to stop a cucumber from turning into a pickle, but there's no way you can turn a pickle back into a cucumber.

it can keep you actively worried about specific things, about what you ate last night, and how your clothes are fitting, and whether or not you should go to the gym—it does a masterful job of keeping less tangible, more daunting matters at bay. The flood of options is reduced to a manageable trickle. Unnamed anxieties are replaced with tangible ones.

attaching all your hopes and fantasies to something—or someone—outside yourself almost always has disastrous results.

tend to side with the Monks of New Skete on the question of the canine desire to please: dogs, they say, care a lot less about pleasing humans than they care about pleasing themselves; if acting in a way that pleases you means something good will happen to them—they'll get a biscuit, a reward, a pat on the back—they're likely to be motivated to carry out the task, but their agenda is not necessarily driven by the pure and selfless wish to make you happy.

One woman's tub of cottage cheese is another's maxed-out MasterCard; one woman's soul-murdering love affair is another's frenzied eating binge. The methods may differ, but boil any of these behaviors down to their essential ingredients and you are likely find a particularly female blend of anxiety, guilt, shame, and sorrow, the psychic roux of profound—and often profoundly misunderstood—hungers.

Sometimes I look back and think my whole adult life has been underlined with a feeling of waiting – waiting for something to happen, waiting for circumstances to change, waiting for the right man or the right job or the right shoes-and-clothes-and-haircut to swoop down from above and change me, to infuse me from the outside in with a feeling of well-being and validation and peace of mind

Sobriety is less about "getting better" in a clear, linear sense than it is about subjecting yourself to change, to the inevitable ups and downs, fears and feelings, victories and failures, that accompany growth. You do get better—or at least you can— but that happens almost by default, by the simple fact of being present in your own life, of being aware and able, finally, to act on the connections you make.