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Drinking: A Love Story

This book offers a nuanced look at the emotional and psychological ties that people form with drinking, weaving together personal stories with broader cultural observations. more

Author

Caroline Knapp
Caroline Knapp

Caroline Knapp was an American writer known for her memoirs and non-fiction works. Born on November 8, 1959, she passed away on June 3, 2002. Her writing often explored themes of addiction and recovery, and she was a prominent figure in the literary world. more

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“Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you're both aware and unaware of it almost all the time, all you know is you'd die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no physiological event that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism. It's a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.”

KnowsTryingReasonMomentsBigsHappensDiesProcessLinesSimpleAirEventsBecomingHeavyAlcoholMysteriousDefinedReason WhyConcreteAlcoholismAlcoholicsElusiveSingle MomDrinkersInsidiousPhysiologicalHeavy Drinkers
Book:Drinking: A Love Story
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“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.”

IfsNeedsGivingHas BeensDesireSexBehindsGardenConstantHungerVarietyLinksYearningPersistentPulseIncompleteContinuumAnorexics
Author:Caroline Knapp
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“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.”

WayMayDifferentJobsFacesRomanceFormThousandBlindLongingExtraordinaryAddictionHungerDietsInternalsPersistEmergingTenacityInsatiable
Author:Caroline Knapp
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“Dogs possess a quality that's rare among humans -- the ability to make you feel valued just by being you -- and it was something of a miracle to me to be on the receiving end of all that acceptance. The dog didn't care what I looked like, or what I did for a living, or what a train wreck of a life I'd led before I got her, or what we did from day to day. She just wanted to be with me, and that awareness gave me a singular sensation of delight.”

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Book:Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs
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“This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?”

Has BeensMadeStillsMomentsMightWould BeGirlPaintingTitlesFixedCanvasMight Have BeenInterruptedSeventeenGirl Interrupted
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