Quotes by Rachel Cusk

I would like”, she resumed, “to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identity and no associations.

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.

To observe is not to not feel—in fact, it is to put yourself at the mercy of feeling, like the childs 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?

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

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.

The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, shes 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 its her equality thats fake.

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.

Shame is something youll 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. Thats the way to crush a girl.

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.

I have a romantic conception of the writers life, and the sort of writers life that I admire is probably a childless life, possibly a marriageless life, certainly a travelling life - Im in awe of how much D.H. Lawrence managed to get around. But thats never been something Im capable of doing.

“Your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to be convince yourself of.”

“Theres a certain point in life at which you realise its no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of lifes illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be.”