The dog’s agenda is simple, fathomable, overt: I want. “I want to go out, come in, eat something, lie here, play with that, kiss you. There are no ul….

The key, I suppose, has less to do with insight than with willingness, the former being relatively useless without the latter..

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….

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 ….

Passivity is corrosive to the soul; it feeds on feelings of integrity and pride, and it can be as tempting as a drug..

To a drinker the sensation is real and pure and akin to something spiritual: you seek; in the bottle, you find..

It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out..

Why do I find the fantasy - husband, family, kids - exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?.

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 t….

I once heard a woman who had lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her fie….

Anorexia is a response to cultural images of the female body - waiflike, angular - that both capitulates to the ideal and also mocks it, strips away ….

A lot of people, quite frankly, think intense attachments to animals are weird and suspect, the domain of people who can't quite handle attachments t….

American companies spend more than $200 billion each year hacking women's bodies into bits and pieces, urging comparisons between self and other, lin….

I am shy by nature, a person who's always found something burdensome about human interaction and who probably always will, at least to some degree..

I don't think that the world would be a better place if everyone owned a dog, and I don't think that all relationships between dogs and their owners ….

Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so..

Mastery over the body - its impulses, its needs, its size - is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty is to risk desirabili….

When I drank, the part that felt dangerous and needy grew bright and strong and real. The part that coveted love kicked into gear. The yes grew loude….

For years, I ate the same foods every day, in exactly the same manner, at exactly the same times..

Cats ... are like four-legged poster children for OCD..

Cottage cheese is one of our culture's most visible symbols of self-denial; marketed honestly, it would appear in dairy cases with warning labels: th….