“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 began to think of myself as a perennial tourist. There was something agreeable about this. To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”
― Don DeLillo, quote from The Names
“See," he said, "the arrow struck against this. It is the kiss I gave her. It has saved her life.”
― J.M. Barrie, quote from Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens / Peter and Wendy
“10. WINDLESTRAWS. KEΦAΔH I WINDLESTRAWS The Abyss of Hallucinations has Law and Reason; but in Truth there is no bond between the Toys of the Gods. This Reason and Law is the Bond of the Great Lie. Truth! Truth! Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations. There is no silence in that Abyss: for all that men call Silence is Its Speech. This Abyss is also called "Hell", and "The Many." Its name is "Consciousness", and "The Universe", among men. But THAT which neither is silent, nor speaks, rejoices therein.”
― Aleister Crowley, quote from The Book of Lies
“I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.”
― Michael Cunningham, quote from Specimen Days
“We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.”
― Ann Patchett, quote from Truth and Beauty
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The Vanishing ThroneBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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