Appetites Quotes

“The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“Consumerism thrives on emotional voids.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“I'm still prone to periods of isolation, still more fearful of the world out there and more averse to pleasure and risk than I'd like to be; I still direct more energy toward controlling and minimizing appetites than toward indulging them.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“Love—the desire to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to give love even if your experience as a recipient has been compromised or incomplete—is the constant on the continuum of hunger, it's what links the anorexic to the garden-variety dieter, it's the persistent pulse of need and yearning behind the reach for food, for sex, for something.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“And so I was scared. I was scared of my own sexual hunger, which felt so secretive and uncharted, and I was scared of the sexual hunger of boys, which felt so vivid and overt, and I was terribly uncertain of the relationships between sex and power and value, which seemed so merged and hard to tease apart. In the midst of all that, I didn't exactly loathe my body, or feel ashamed of it, but I was deeply ashamed of my fear, which felt disabling and immature and woefully, painfully uncool, a terrible secret, evidence of some profound failing and ignorance on my part. Other girls, or so I imagined, knew what to do, how to use their power, how to derive pleasure from it, and in contrast, I felt not only freakish but isolated, as though I was standing outside a vital, defining loop.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“Your needs are overwhelming? You can’t depend on yourself or others to meet them? You don’t even know what they are? Then need nothing.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“So it persists, for many of us, hunger channeled into some internal circuitry of longing, routed this way and that, emerging in a thousand different forms. The diet form, the romance form, the addiction form, the overriding hunger for this purchase or that job, this relationship or that one. Hunger may be insatiable by nature, it may be fathomless, but our will to fill it, our often blind tenacity in the face of it, can be extraordinary.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“What we want, of course, what lies in the cupboard marked 'important,' is connection, love: If the deepest source of human hunger had a name, that would be it; if the boxes of constraint in which so many women live could be smashed to bits, that would be the tool, the sledgehammer that shatters emptiness and uncovers the hope buried beneath it.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“In one of the largest surveys of its kind to date, nearly 30,000 women told researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine that they'd rather lose weight than attain any other goal, a figure that alone suggests just how complicated the issue of appetite can be for women. This is the primary female striving? The appetite to lose appetite?
In fact, I suspect the opposite is true: that the primary, underlying striving among many women at the start of the millennium is the appetite for appetite: a longing to feel safe and secure enough to name one's true appetites and worthy and powerful enough to get them satisfied.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“If only we lived in a culture in which internal measures of satisfaction and success — a capacity for joy and caring, an ability to laugh, a sense of connection to others, a belief in social justice — were as highly valued as external measures. If only we lived in a culture that made ambition compatible with motherhood and family life, that presented models of women who were integrated and whole: strong, sexual, ambitious, cued into their own varied appetites and demands, and equipped with the freedom and resources to explore all of them. If only women felt less isolated in their frustration and fatigue, less torn between competing hungers, less compelled to keep nine balls in the air at once, and less prone to blame themselves when those balls come crashing to the floor. If only we exercised our own power, which is considerable but woefully underused; if only we defined desire on our own terms. And — painfully, truly — if only we didn't care so much about how we looked, how much we weighed, what we wore.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“Being known. This, of course, is the goal, the agenda so carefully hidden it may be unknown even to the self. The cutter cuts to make the pain at her center visible. The anorexic starves to make manifest her hunger and vulnerability. The extremes announce, This is who I am, this is what I feel, this is what happens when I don't get what I need. In quadraphonic sound, they give voice to the most central human hunger, which is the desire to be recognized, to be known and loved because of, and in spite of, who you are; they give voice to the sorrow that takes root when that hunger is unsatisfied.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“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.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“When you hear nothing about the body, he suggests, you stop listening to it, and feeling it; you stop experiencing it as a worthy, integrated entity.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“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?”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“As a journalist in Providence, I was particularly drawn toward stories about women's issues: I wrote about discrimination, abortion, violence against women. I wrote about women's health, sexism in the media, cultural imagery. I even wrote about women (other women) with eating disorders. And quietly, privately, I starved myself half to death. There you have it: intellectual belief without the correlary of emotional roots; feminist power understood in the mind but not known, somehow, in the body.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“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.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“That these mandates exist is hardly news, but their cumulative effect on women’s lives tends to be examined through a fragmented lens, one-pathology-at-a-time, the eating disorder lit on the self-help shelves separated from the books on women’s troubled relationships with men, the books on compulsive shopping separated from the books on female sexuality, the books on culture and media separated from the books on female psychology. Take your pick, choose your demon: Women Who Love Too Much in one camp, Women Who Eat Too Much in another, Women Who Shop Too Much in a third. In fact, the camps are not so disparate, and the question of appetite—specifically the question of what happens to the female appetite when it’s submerged and rerouted—is the thread that binds them together. 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.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“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?”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“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”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“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.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“dog beside you on the bed, a creature of heartbreakingly satiable needs.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“And as any good feminist economist will tell you, the deflecting power of consumerism has a long and well-earned reputation for serving men, and serving them quite effectively: They control the marketplace, and they permit women to be in charge of the goods, an activity that fills up lots of time, steers energy in limited and specific directions (toward decorating, adorning, pleasing the eye), and also has marvelously mind-numbing effect.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author), Appetites: Why Women Want

“The real struggle...is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for her life to begin.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“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.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“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.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“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.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want

“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.”
― Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want