“When you quit drinking you stop waiting.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“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, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“The hard things in life, the things you really learn from, happen with a clear mind.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“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, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“For a long time, when it's working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we are. In some ways the dynamic is simple: alcohol makes everything better, until it makes everything worse.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“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?”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“Addiction to alcohol is also a neurological phenomenon, the result of a complex set of molecular alterations that take place in the brain when it’s excessively and repeatedly exposed to the drug. The science of addiction is complicated, but the basic idea is fairly straightforward: alcohol appears to wreak havoc on the brain’s natural systems of craving and reward, compromising the functioning of the various neurotransmitters and proteins that create feelings of well-being.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“A love story. Yes: this is a love story.
It's about passion, sensual pleasure, deep pulls, lust, fears, yearning hungers. It's about needs so strong they're crippling. It about saying goodbye to something you can't fathom living without.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“Meg often slept with me 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.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“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 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 though it’s painful and you’re afraid. When you drink, you can’t do that. You can’t make the distinction between getting through painful feelings and getting away from them. All you can do is just sit there, numb and sipping, numb and drunk.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“Anyone who's ever shifted from general affection and enthusiasm for a lover to outright obsession knows what I mean: the relationship is just there occupying a small corner of your heart, and then you wake up one morning and some undefinable tide has turned forever and you can't go back. You need it; it's a central part of who you are.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“Insight,” he said, “is almost always a rearrangement of fact.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“I loved the way drink made me feel, and I loved it's special power of deflection, it's ability to shift my focus away from my own awareness of self and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings. I loved the sounds of drink: the slide of a cork as it eased out of a wine bottle, the distinct glug-glug of booze pouring into a glass, the clatter of ice cubes in a tumbler. I loved the rituals, the camaraderie of drinking with others, the warming, melting feeling of ease and courage it gave me.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“Beneath my own witty, profession facade were oceans of fear, whole rivers of self-doubt.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“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.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“You're the nice, quiet alcoholic. The good intellectual alcoholic.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“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.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“I don't think you can get really out of anorexia (or any addiction, for that matter) until you simply have no other choice, until the sense that your back's against the wall grows too strong and too irrefutable, until you are simply in too much pain - too desperate and deeply bored and unhappy - to go on.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“I’d go to a party and promise Michael I wouldn’t drink too much. He’d plead: “Just take it easy, okay? Watch yourself,” and I’d swear: “I won’t. I don’t want to get too drunk.” I’d mean that, of course, and I’d start out by measuring myself: one glass of wine the first half hour, one glass the second, and so on. But then something would snap, some uncontrollable process would kick in, and all of a sudden it would be two or three hours later and I’d be on my sixth or tenth or God knows what glass of wine, and I’d be plastered. I couldn’t account for it, couldn’t explain it, couldn’t even rationalize it, although I struggled mightily to. I seemed to get drunk, blind drunk, against my will.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“When you love somebody, or something, it's amazing how willing you are to overlook the flaws.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“You hide behind the professional persona all day; then you leave the office and hide behind the drink.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“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.”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
“time I wanted to explain the perils of growing”
― Caroline Knapp, quote from Drinking: A Love Story
Caroline Knapp
Born place: in The United States
Born date November 8, 1959
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“I read an article once that said that when women have a conversation, they're communicating on five levels. They follow the conversation that they're actually having, the conversation that is specifically being avoided, the tone being applied to the overt conversation, the buried conversation that is being covered only in subtext, and finally the other person's body language.
That is, on many levels, astounding to me. I mean, that's like having a freaking superpower. When I, and most other people with a Y chromosome, have a conversation, we're having a conversation. Singular. We're paying attention to what is being said, considering that, and replying to it. All these other conversations that have apparently been booing on for the last several thousand years? I didn't even know that they existed until I read that stupid article, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
...
So, ladies, if you ever have some conversation with your boyfriend or husband or brother or male friend, and you are telling him something perfectly obvious, and he comes away from it utterly clueless? I know it's tempting to thing to yourself, 'The man can't possibly be that stupid!'
But yes. Yes, he can.
Our innate strengths just aren't the same. We are the mighty hunters, who are good at focusing on one thing at a time. For crying out loud, we have to turn down the radio in the car if we suspect we're lost and need to figure out how to get where we're going. That's how impaired we are. I'm telling you, we have only the one conversation. Maybe some kind of relationship veteran like Michael Carpenter can do two, but that's pushing the envelope. Five simultaneous conversations? Five?
Shah. That just isn't going to happen. At least, not for me.”
― Jim Butcher, quote from Cold Days
“If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.”
― Richard Dawkins, quote from The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
“You make me think I might discover parts of myself I doona know exist.”
― Karen Marie Moning, quote from The Highlander's Touch
“For where shall a man turn who has no money? Where can he go? Wide, wide world, but as narrow as the coins in your hand. Like a tethered goat, so far and no farther. Only money can make the rope stretch, only money.”
― Kamala Markandaya, quote from Nectar in a Sieve
“Many perfumes promise to lure men to women. None of them smell of motherhood. None of them proclaim the wearer to be tidy, thrifty, and sensible.”
― Janette Rallison, quote from My Fair Godmother
Forever
The Confusion
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Rodrick Rules
Death with Interrupt...
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