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, Pack of Two

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, Pack of Two

. . . the gospel of femininity, which is essentially self-negating may explain why a quality of guilt and murkiness can so easily leak into a woman’s experience of appetite, a profound uncertainty about entitlement, even a sense that desire itself is indefinable or inappropriate.
-Caroline Knapp, Appetites

Starving, like all disorders of appetite, is a solution to a wide variety of conflicts and fears, or at least it starts out resembling a solution: Something feels perversely good, or right, or gratifying about it, some key seems to slide into place, some distress is assuaged, and the benefits of this are strong enough to outweigh whatever negative or painful feelings are aroused, such as shame, confusion or physical hunger.
-Caroline Knapp, Appetites

. . . [appetites] exist in a very murky context, and an inherently unstable one, consistently pulled between the opposing poles of possibility and constraint, power and powerlessness.
-Caroline Knapp, Appetites

I steered the boat into the dock and sat for a moment looking out at the water, a wide ribbon of blue, glassy as a mirror in patches, rippled and glinting with diamonds of sunlight in others. I thought about that young woman with her cat and her pile of blankets, and I thought about how sculling had served a similar purpose, reintroducing me to beauty and grace, reframing the body as a source of pleasure. Defining desire in new ways is achingly complicated, painstaking work; it requires developing a vision that runs counter to consumerism, counter to a corporate and political culture that's still tightly structured to meet male needs, perhaps even counter one's own deeply-ingrained assumptions...But new visions do get forged, and if they're not political in a large social sense, they certainly involve shifts in personal politics, in defining what works, what fits, what matters...The public battlefields may be private ones today, but the dynamics are largely the same. Anything that connects you - to the body, to the self, to other women - can free. Anything that frees may also feed.
-Caroline Knapp, Appetites

Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, has written about what he calls “the tyranny of freedom,” arguing that the sheer volume of choices in American life has come to feel oppressive and overwhelming: the proliferation ratchets up expectations and anxieties (there’s always something better around the corner) and overloads the psyche...
-Caroline Knapp, Appetites

The mathematics of desire mitigates precisely that anxiety. A woman - particularly a woman who feels fundamentally disempowered and uncertain - makes up new rules, replaces external constraints with internal ones, installs systems of mastery that operate from the inside out, the tyranny of freedom reconfigured as the tyranny of self.

-Caroline Knapp, Appetites