Home > Author > Rachel Cusk
81 " You can't tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person. "
― Rachel Cusk , Kudos
82 " Your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to be convince yourself of. "
― Rachel Cusk , Outline
83 " It was perfectly possible to become the prisoner of an artist’s vision, I said. Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again. "
― Rachel Cusk , Transit
84 " I had found out more, I said, by listening than I had ever thought possible. "
85 " It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes. "
86 " But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. I had started to become, in effect, angry. I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage. "
87 " Writing comes out of tension, tension between what's inside and what's outside. "
88 " 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. "
89 " 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. "
90 " They walked in straight lines that the dogs scribbled all over. "
― Rachel Cusk , Arlington Park
91 " The sad fact...is that in this era of science and unbelief we have lost the sense of our own significance. We have become cruel, to ourselves and others, because we believe that ultimately we have no value. "
92 " Indeed, we believe everyone has a book in them - a book, not a symphony, and not even a poem. What is it, this book everyone has in them? It is, perhaps, that haunting entity, the 'true' self. The true self seeks release, not constraint. "
― Rachel Cusk , Coventry: Essays
93 " Podría ser que solo cuando ya es demasiado tarde para escapar nos demos cuenta de que siempre hemos sido libres. "
94 " I knew then, she said, that he was a liar, that for all his reportage and his honesty he was determined to keep himself untouched, to take without giving, to hoard himself like a greedy child. "
95 " 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. "
96 " If a man had a nasty side to his character, she wanted to get to it immediately and confront it. She didn’t want it roaming unseen in the hinterland of the relationship: she wanted to provoke it, to draw it forth, lest it strike her when her back was turned. "
97 " 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. "
98 " It was an interesting idea, I said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need – as was generally assumed – to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility. "
99 " The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of sight. "
100 " A visit to the cinema is no longer that: it is less, a tarnished thing, an alloyed pleasure. "
― Rachel Cusk , A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother