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 KnappAcademic achievement was something I'd always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got them in order to sew up approval.
Caroline KnappBefore you open the lunch menu or order that cheeseburger or consider eating the cake with the frosting intact, haul out the psychic calculator and start tinkering with the budget.
Caroline KnappLoveโthe 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 incompleteโis 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 KnappSomething is missing: that's as close as I can come to naming the sensation, an awareness of missed or thwarted connections, or of a great hollowness left where something lovely and solid used to be. ...There is something fundamentally insatiable about being human, as though we come into the world with a kind of built-in tension between the experience of being hungry, which is a condition of striving and yearning, and the experience of being fed, which may offer temporary satisfaction but always gives way to new strivings, new yearnings.
Caroline Knapp