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Kudos QUOTES

Kudos QUOTES

1 " I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world---whatever its features---was catastrophic. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

2 " You asked me earlier,' she said to me, 'whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don't have the answer to that,' she said, 'but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

3 " A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

4 " He had many friends – smart, aspirational people of good taste – who had planted a jacaranda tree in their new garden as though this law of nature somehow didn’t apply to them and they could make it grow by the force of their will. After a year or two they would become frustrated and complain that it had barely increased even an inch. But it would take twenty, thirty, forty years for one of these trees to grow and yield its beautiful display, he said smiling: when you tell them this fact they are horrified, perhaps because they can’t imagine remaining in the same house or indeed the same marriage for so long, and they almost come to hate their jacaranda tree, he said, sometimes even digging it up and replacing it with something else, because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards. It is almost a tragedy, he said, that the same people who are capable of wanting the jacaranda tree and understanding its beauty are incapable of nurturing one themselves. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

5 " 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 , Kudos

6 " 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 , Kudos

7 " You can't tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

8 " Podría ser que solo cuando ya es demasiado tarde para escapar nos demos cuenta de que siempre hemos sido libres. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

9 " 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 , Kudos

10 " 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. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

11 " That tribe was one to which nearly all the men in this country belonged, and it defined itself through a fear of women combined with an utter dependence on them. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

12 " She had to admit this journalist was one of her trickier customers, and his interviews nearly always ended with the same argument, since he seemed to take such a long time to get round to asking a question and when he did, discovered that he himself had the best answer for it. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

13 " I realised,’ she said, ‘that she was happy for the first time in her life, and I realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

14 " The one thing you can say about people for sure,’ Ryan said, ‘is that they’ll only free themselves if freedom is in their own interest. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

15 " I said that while her story suggested that human lives could be governed by the laws of narrative, and all the notions of retribution and justice that narrative lays claim to, it was in fact merely her interpretation of events that created that illusion. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

16 " 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 , Kudos

17 " If you were a woman you would certainly find your mother’s life hanging over your head like a sword and you would be asking yourself what progress you had made, other than to double for yourself the work she had been expected to do and receive three times the blame for it. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

18 " a saddening thought, she said, that when a group of women get together, far from advancing the cause of femininity, they end up pathologising it. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

19 " realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did. "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos

20 " because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards "

― Rachel Cusk , Kudos