Top 100 Rachel Cusk Quotes

#1. I don't go to church any more, but I think that Catholicism is rather like the brand they use on cattle: I feel so formed in that Catholic mould that I don't think I could adopt any other form of spirituality. I still get feelings of consolation about churches.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #14342
#2. There's this really good line in 'Women in Love' where Ursula says, 'I always thought it was a sin to be unhappy.' And actually I think that's very common, it's what a lot of people feel - that you have an obligation to life to be happy if you can.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #28688
#3. What she couldn't stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #36073
#4. I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #51378
#5. Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #59478
#6. Yet I still, he said, believe in love. Love restores almost everything, and where it can't restore, it takes away the pain.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #62448
#7. Modern morality is all about perception.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #82453
#8. Female hysteria is a subject I'm very fond of. I always try to bring it in somewhere. For me, it is the finest part of the line between comedy and tragedy.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #82742
#9. What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #87704
#10. Rachel Cusk's books are like pop-up volumes for grown-ups, the prose springing out of the page to bop you neatly between the eyes with its insights.

Julie Burchill

Rachel Cusk Quotes #95633
#11. Parenthood, like death, is an event for which it is nearly impossible to be prepared. It brings you into a new relationship with the fact of your own existence, a relationship in which one may be rendered helpless.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #97721
#12. If I know somebody is coming 'round, it is incredibly difficult for me to work because I'm waiting for this interruption - even the children's comings and goings are interruptions. Cake-making is a good way of coming out of that space.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #145664
#13. And of those two ways of living - living in the moment and living outside it - which was more real?

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #238663
#14. I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #263538
#15. Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #269731
#16. In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #276446
#17. We are all, in our journey through life, navigating toward some special, dreamed-of place, and if for some reason we are thrown off course, or the place itself, once reached, is not what we hoped for, then we must strike out at whatever risk to set things right.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #278044
#18. A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #289228
#19. My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #290292
#20. To be optimistic about something that is absolutely unknown to you is unfounded.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #295046
#21. For years I had lived in my body half-consciously, ignoring it mostly, dismissing its agendas wherever I could, and forever pressing it into the service of mental conceptions that resulted, almost as a by-product, sometimes in its pleasuring and sometimes in its abuse.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #308692
#22. I'm particularly drawn to actors in their own little drama. I find it's that area I'm very alive to. And I don't encounter it that often. You have to be far from civilization, you have to be far from New York or London to find people who do that.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #324473
#23. To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #338652
#24. I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #347942
#25. Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #372933
#26. They walked in straight lines that the dogs scribbled all over.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #378487
#27. An eating disorder epidemic suggests that love and disgust are being jointly marketed, as it were; that wherever the proposition might first have come from, the unacceptability of the female body has been disseminated culturally.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #379074
#28. It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #387204
#29. For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #401529
#30. Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #464680
#31. And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people's lives a commentary on my own.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #466103
#32. I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #502166
#33. What compromises women - babies, domesticity, mediocrity - compromises writing even more.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #523575
#34. The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - 'Everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it?' Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #557653
#35. Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #576376
#36. The British have always made terrible parents.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #577421
#37. As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #581905
#38. If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #585944
#39. I didn't appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #601592
#40. Money is a country all its own,

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #661743
#41. Most of didn't know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #680139
#42. People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #685323
#43. I sometimes feel that the world is a very uncivilised place where it is meant to be at its most civilised. Where it's meant to be intellectual or artistic or compassionate, it isn't, and that makes me very angry.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #747910
#44. So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #751522
#45. We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #755348
#46. Shame is something you'll find a lot of - particularly Catholic - girls feel about their bodies, about their sexuality, about their diet, about anything you like. Shame is the way you keep them down. That's the way to crush a girl.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #772400
#47. How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #831437
#48. Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #858283
#49. A book is not an example of 'women's writing' simply because it is written by a woman. Writing may become 'women's writing' when it could not have been written by a man.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #877652
#50. Having your second child, in case you were wondering, is a lot harder than having your first, except for those people who find it easier. I'm afraid I don't have the latest figures to confirm this.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #897081
#51. Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #911650
#52. I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #913203
#53. I absolutely don't dislike children - I would choose their company over adult company any time.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #914972
#54. The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #966524
#55. I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #991019
#56. The anorexic is out to prove how little she needs, how little she can survive on; she is out, in a sense, to discredit her nurturers, while at the same time making a public crisis out of her need for nurture. Such vulnerability and such power: it brings the whole female machinery to a halt.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1015424
#57. I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1027252
#58. The woman who has her being in marriage and motherhood has become part of antithetical reality, revoking property from the woman who remains in a condition of intangible femininity.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1039619
#59. I have some pretty forceful ideas about the world - obviously I do. But I suppose I can only really speak about them from within the protection of a literary form.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1058286
#60. Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1062760
#61. Among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1104039
#62. Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1111394
#63. I don't think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same condition. I thought it was unreachable, that it was sort of dead people. It took me a long time - I think I was well into novel writing before I really thought, 'Actually, this is a valid pastime.'

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1129365
#64. Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1134358
#65. It seems success takes you away from what you know, [Athenian plane passenger] said, while failure condemns you to it.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1172875
#66. The old world of England was picturesque and safe in a way that L.A. wasn't, but it was so amazingly socially cruel. I had never experienced that in America - never in school, nowhere.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1188898
#67. Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1215813
#68. I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1246686
#69. Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1263975
#70. A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn't buy your way into it.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1283832
#71. I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1313678
#72. And he was more Irish in America than he'd ever been at home.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1320730
#73. Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1348753
#74. I have a romantic conception of the writer's life, and the sort of writer's life that I admire is probably a childless life, possibly a marriageless life, certainly a travelling life - I'm in awe of how much D.H. Lawrence managed to get around. But that's never been something I'm capable of doing.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1351157
#75. Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1353081
#76. Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1378192
#77. It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1398233
#78. There is always shame in the creation of an object for the public gaze.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1402567
#79. As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1449148
#80. I mean, you never hear someone say they wanted to have an affair but they couldn't find the time, do you?

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1452638
#81. The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that others are demanding to be given it back - to be 'taught' - is disturbing.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1468080
#82. The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1483177
#83. A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1504468
#84. It's a taboo that comes back over and over, to suggest that women can feel divided - that you can love your child and want to do everything for it, and at the same time want to put it away from you and reclaim something of yourself.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1505032
#85. There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1506825
#86. Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1513799
#87. I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1578457
#88. A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1599887
#89. What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1605524
#90. The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1613212
#91. That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1655574
#92. It seems to me that 'women's writing' by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1658853
#93. It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1659260
#94. She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1674169
#95. The 'good' mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the 'bad' mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is, in reality, good.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1677645
#96. The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn't want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1689863
#97. Yet I believe, as I say, that it was precisely this underhand act that gave birth to her vitriol, for people are at their least forgiving when they themselves have been underhand, as though they would exact their innocence from you at any price.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1749064
#98. What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1752712
#99. A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1757946
#100. I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes #1763024

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