Quotes by Rachel Kushner

Who knew why they waited, I thought, understanding that I, too, had it in me to wait. To expect change to come from outside, to concentrate on the task of meeting it, waiting to meet it, rather than going out and finding it.

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

Theres an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girls dreaming. They arent real. They arent the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station, a paperboy trying to lure you into a toolshed, a friends father trying to lure you into his car. They dont lure. They beckon, but like desert mirages.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.

I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.

If your parents died suddenly, Sandro understood, your home was wherever you were, and now you were from nowhere. Your parents were your provenance. Dead, you had no provenance.

All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom.

I thought of the girl in the photo in Ronnies studio, the one on layaway. She was probably waiting for him this very moment, somewhere downtown. Checking the clock, applying lipstick, concentrating herself into an arrow pointed at Ronnie. Doing the various things women did when they had to wait for something they wanted.

What happens slowly carries in each part the possibility of returning to what came before. In an accident everything is simultaneous, sudden, irreversible. It means this: no going back.

A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.

Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste.

I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.

Tone is somewhat totalising in that, once I locate it, it tells me what kind of syntax to use, what word choices to make, how much white space to leave on the page, what sentence length, what the rhythmic patterning will be. If I cant find the tone, I sometimes try narrating through the point of view of someone else.

I usually get up between 7 A.M. and 8 A.M., have coffee, and go right to work. Its really important not to get sidetracked in the morning so Im still in that dreamy state for my writing.

I dont believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing exactly that produces a useful sorting mechanism in our society in order to separate children into categories of promising and doomed. The tests seem arbitrary and without real scientific value and yet have lasting consequences.

The Seventies seemed like this really open time. There were a lot of strong women characters deciding what kind of artists they wanted to be.

Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.

Art is like a stock with a decent return for people in finance, and they get to feel like they are involved with culture, spend time with artists, as part of their dividend.

Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. Its very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

These women were taking over these former manufacturing warehouses in SoHo and figuring out a way to be fashionable and viable without money. Its hard to imagine a life like that in Manhattan now - theres something romantic about it.