Michelle P

“At that point on the continuum of cultural history, several degrees from active or meaningful talk about what beauty and power and confidence actually meant, I thought I should know, intuitively, how to be that woman, how to combine sexuality and ambition, how to navigate all those fuzzy lines between femininity and authority, relationships and autonomy. And not knowing these things intuitively, I thought I was missing something, or had missed something, or (more hopefully) might acquire something if only I looked in the right place...if only, if only. This is what's insidious about consumerism: It's not that it encourages us to shop but that it encourages us to forget, not that it sparks need but that it dilutes it, shrink-wraps it and flings it into the handiest and most tangible containers.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)

“The tough part, of course, have to do with finding love, and then taking that sledgehammer and breaking out of the box long enough to hold onto it, which in itself is no small feat. That job involves naming desires, and it involves understanding what stands in its way, and it involves mustering the strength and courage and self-acceptance to smash through the constraints, consequences be damned. The key - the bridge to the shore - is agency, a feeling (almost always hard-won) that marries entitlement with power: I deserve to be filled becomes I can be filled, I can make it happen.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)

“When anxiety about the body runs deeply enough, adherence to the rules - don’t eat, keep the mouth shut, pack up the butane-powered curling iron, starve yourself half crazy - comes to feel voluntary, the mandates self-generated and freely embraced.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)

“The Butcher's egoless brutality, hammered linear by what she could not know, less than primitive, was for all its horror, still human. Though bloody handed, he was safer than the precision of the world linguistically corrected...Jebel's cruelties, kindnesses, existed in the articulate limits of civilization. But this red bestiality - fascinated her!”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17