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The one thing you can say about people for sure, is that they'll only free themselves if freedom is in their own interest.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: The one thing you can
Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one's own destiny by what one doesn't notice or feel compassion for; that what you don't know and don't make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: Sometimes it has seemed to
I had been thinking lately about evil, I went on, and was beginning to realize that it was not a product of will but of it's opposite, of surrender. It represented the relinquishing of effort, the abandonment of self-discipline in the face of desire. It was, in a way, a state of passion.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: I had been thinking lately
They walked in straight lines that the dogs scribbled all over.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: They walked in straight lines
What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
Rachel Cusk Quotes: What other grown-up gets told
Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: Writing is a discipline: it's
The British have always made terrible parents.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: The British have always made
Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn't sure I would ever discover whether this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for. All I knew was that it carried a kind of honour, if you survived it, and left you in a relationship to the truth that seemed closer, but that in fact might have been identical to the truthfulness of staying in one place.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: Suffering had always appeared to
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 Quotes: It is interesting how keen
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 Quotes: Hope is like one of
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 Quotes: There was a great difference,
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 Quotes: I didn't appear to need
...it is the very thing you don't see, the thing you take for granted, that deceives you. And how can you even know you have taken something for granted until it is no longer there?
Rachel Cusk Quotes: ...it is the very thing
The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: The reaction to 'Aftermath' has
I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: I'm waiting for the day
To be optimistic about something that is absolutely unknown to you is unfounded.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: To be optimistic about something
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 Quotes: The old world of England
There is always shame in the creation of an object for the public gaze.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: There is always shame in
I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: I don't really believe in
This feeling, that she was the invisible witness to another person's solitude - a kind of ghost - nearly drove her mad for awhile.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: This feeling, that she was
Some people are better at maths than others: no one thinks you can be 'taught' to be a mathematical genius. And no one thinks of teaching, in that context, as a kind of forcing of the will. But there seems to be an idea of writing as an intuitive pastime which is being dishonestly subjected to counterintuitive methods.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: Some people are better at
I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: I remain fascinated by where
I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: I felt that I could
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 Quotes: So much is lost, he
Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: Like the child, the creative
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 Quotes: What she couldn't stand, she
What compromises women - babies, domesticity, mediocrity - compromises writing even more.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: What compromises women - babies,
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 Quotes: As it stands, motherhood is
...when my sons were the ages of those two leaping boys, they were so intimate it would have been hard to disentangle their separate natures. They used to play together without pause from the moment they opened their eyes in the morning to the moment they closed them again. Their play was a kind of shared trance in which they created whole imaginary worlds, and they were forever involved in games and projects whose planning and execution were as real to them as they were invisible to everyone else: sometimes I would move or throw away some apparently inconsequential item, only to be told that it was a sacred prop in the ongoing make-believe, a narrative which seemed to run like a magic river through our household, inexhaustible, and which they could exit and re-enter at will, moving over that threshold which no one else could see into another element. And then one day the river dried up: their shared world of imagination ceased, and the reason was that one of them - I can't even recall which one it was - stopped believing in it. In other words, it was nobody's fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: ...when my sons were the
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 Quotes: Among other things a marriage
She would begin to view them ... with greater objectivity; their need for her started to look like something less discriminating, more parasitical. She felt duped by them into believing herself to be generous, tireless, inspiring, when in fact she was just a self-sacrificing victim. It was this feeling that often brought her to a position of clarity about her own life. She would start to give them less and herself more: by draining her, they created in her a new capacity for selfishness.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: She would begin to view
All writers, Julian went on, are attention seekers: why else would we be sitting up here on this stage? The fact is, he said, no one took enough notice of us when we were small and now we're making them pay for it. Any writer who denied the childish element of revenge in what they did was, as far as he was concerned, a liar. Writing was just a way of taking justice into your own hands. If you wanted the proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: All writers, Julian went on,
It seems success takes you away from what you know, [Athenian plane passenger] said, while failure condemns you to it.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: It seems success takes you
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 Quotes: I'm particularly drawn to actors
Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: Childhood, after all, is not
Your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to be convince yourself of.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: Your failures keep returning to
Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: Christianity has kept itself going
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 Quotes: I have some pretty forceful
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 Quotes: Female hysteria is a subject
The anorexic body is held in the grip of will alone; its meaning is far from stable. What it says - 'Notice me, feed me, mother me' - is not what it means, for such attentions constitute an agonising test of that will, and also threaten to return the body to the dreaded 'normality' it has been such ecstasy to escape.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: The anorexic body is held
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 Quotes: The 'good' mother, with her
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 Quotes: It's a taboo that comes
She never said anything unless she had something important to express, which made you realise how much of what people generally said – and he included himself in this statement – was unimportant.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: She never said anything unless
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 Quotes: The writing you allude to
I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: I suppose, I said, it
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 Quotes: Parenthood, like death, is an
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 Quotes: Yet I still, he said,
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 Quotes: Writing, more than any other
But in a way it's like looking at old photographs of yourself. There comes a point at which the record needs to be updated, because you've shed too many links with what you were. He doesn't quite know how it happened; all he knows is that he doesn't recognize himself in those stories any more, though he remembers the bursting feeling of writing them, something in himself massing and pushing irresistibly to be born. He hasn't had that feeling since; he almost thinks that to remain a writer he'd have to become one all over again, when he might just easily become an astronaut, or a farmer. It's as if he can't quite remember what drove him into words in the first place, all those years before, yet words are what he still deals in. I suppose it's a bit like marriage, he said. You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that's never repeated. It's the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: But in a way it's
...it was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them. Yet there was also a purity to that image that attracted her, filled as it was with possibilities for self-reinvention. To be freed from clutter, both mental and verbal, was in some ways an appealing prospect; until you remembered something you needed that you had had to leave behind. She, for instance, found herself unable to make jokes when she spoke in another language...So it was not, she imagined, a question of translation so much as one of adaptation. The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew...
Rachel Cusk Quotes: ...it was a funny idea,
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 Quotes: What I increasingly felt, in
She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: She wondered whether the books
... when people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them. Not changing, in other words, deprived them of what they'd gone to such trouble to attain (freedom).
Rachel Cusk Quotes: ... when people freed themselves
You have to forget about the boys,' he said. 'For a while at least... They'll devour you... They can't help it. It's in their nature. They'll take it all until there's nothing left.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: You have to forget about
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 Quotes: Most of didn't know how
Loneliness, she said, is when nothing will stick to you, when nothing will thrive around you, when you start to think that you kill things just by being there.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: Loneliness, she said, is when
I was aware, in those early days of motherhood, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed, taken over by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. Like any cult, it demanded a complete surrender of identity to belong to it.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: I was aware, in those
My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: My children are living, thinking
I was born abroad, but my parents were both English. Still, those few years of separation, and then coming back to England as an outsider, did give me an ability to see the country in a slightly detached way. I suppose I was made aware of what Englishness actually is because I only became immersed in it later in life.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: I was born abroad, but
It was an interesting thought, that stability might be seen as the product of risk; it was perhaps when people tried to keep things the same that the process of decline began.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: It was an interesting thought,
Writing comes out of tension, tension between what's inside and what's outside.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: Writing comes out of tension,
And of those two ways of living - living in the moment and living outside it - which was more real?
Rachel Cusk Quotes: And of those two ways
I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: I am a good and
We have possessed virtually nothing in our life in Italy. In England, I became increasingly sure that to possess something was to arrest your knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession. But there is an element of death in knowledge (...) Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost. It is the reliquary of the vanished object. Its presence is painful, because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: We have possessed virtually nothing
I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn't, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: I said it seemed to
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 Quotes: It had been, in other
I absolutely don't dislike children - I would choose their company over adult company any time.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: I absolutely don't dislike children
How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?
Rachel Cusk Quotes: How can there be so
I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: I have absolutely no concept
It was strange, he said, but standing there on the sidewalk with the great grey chasms of Toronto's streets extending away to every side of him and the leash dangling from his hand, he had felt for the first time that he was at home: the feeling of having unwittingly caused an irreversible change, of his failure being the force that broke new ground, was, he realized standing there, the deepest and most familiar thing he knew. By failing he created loss, and loss was the threshold to freedom: an awkward and uncomfortable threshold, but the only one he had ever been able to cross; usually, he said, because he was shoved across it as a consequence of the events that had brought him there.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: It was strange, he said,
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 Quotes: And likewise I was beginning
It is hard to listen while you were talking.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: It is hard to listen
I had found out more, I said, by listening than I had ever thought possible.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: I had found out more,
My neighbour turned to me again, and asked me what work it was that was taking me to Athens. For the second time I felt the conscious effort of his enquiry, as though he had trained himself in the recovery of objects that were falling from his grasp. I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing – a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball – and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realise the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what tha
Rachel Cusk Quotes: My neighbour turned to me
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 Quotes: The true self seeks release,
It was just a question of not looking too closely at things. Close-up, the mad weave was bizarre and imageless, but from a distance a pattern could perhaps be discerned and somewhere within it all that she knew: her family, her friends and then herself, all of them busily plaiting and seeing, creating the small corner of life they would one day look back, together or apart, as their own. She supposed one only found out how one compared by looking at the picture. It was the final result and she would wait for it, as those around her were now waiting.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: It was just a question
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 Quotes: The world is constantly evolving,
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 Quotes: As writers go, I have
You could time a suburban story by your watch: it lasts as long as it takes a small furry animal that's lonely to find friends, or a small furry animal that's lost to find its parents; it lasts as long as a quick avowal of love; it lasts precisely as long as the average parent is disposed on a Tuesday night to spend reading aloud to children.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: You could time a suburban
It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: It is living, not thinking,
To observe is not to not feel - in fact, it is to put yourself at the mercy of feeling, like the child's warm skin meeting the cold air of midnight. My own children, too, have been roused from the unconsciousness of childhood; theirs too is the pain and the gift of awareness. 'I have two homes,' my daughter said to me one evening, clearly and carefully, 'and I have no home.' To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to be happy without knowing why?
Rachel Cusk Quotes: To observe is not to
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 Quotes: I think a lot of
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 Quotes: The woman who thinks she
Music,' she said, in a languorous and dreamlike manner. 'Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: Music,' she said, in a
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 Quotes: An eating disorder epidemic suggests
He had destroyed the thing she loved most; she, in her turn, had exposed him to failure through expectations he was unable to fulfil. Without meaning to, they had found one another's deepest vulnerabilities: they had arrived, by this awful shortcut, at the place where for each of them a relationship usually ended, and set out from there.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: He had destroyed the thing
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 Quotes: It seems to me that
And he was more Irish in America than he'd ever been at home.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: And he was more Irish
Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: Even if they knew the
But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: But everything falls away, try
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 Quotes: We are all, in our
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 Quotes: Yet I believe, as I
At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: At times, Melete continued, it
It may be the case, she said, that it is only when it is too late to escape that we see we were free all along.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: It may be the case,
But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: But what other people thought
In marriage you go away from other people, but at the end of marriage they come out to welcome you back. This is civilisation, she says. The worst thing that happened to you has brought out the best in them. 88
Rachel Cusk Quotes: In marriage you go away
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 Quotes: For years I had lived
It is expected that a children's story will raise a difficulty and then resolve it: increasingly, this resolution is so prompt and so resounding that one forgets what exactly the difficulty was.
Rachel Cusk Quotes: It is expected that a
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 Quotes: Society in the English countryside
Money is a country all its own,
Rachel Cusk Quotes: Money is a country all
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