Quotes from Rachel Cusk

Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.

Modern morality is all about perception.

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.

I probably didn't share his feelings – he hoped, really, that I didn't – but he was no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don't bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.

It's strange,' he said, 'that you always changed everything and I changed nothing and yet we've both ended up in the same place.

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

When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.

I would like to be a D.H. Lawrence character, living in one of his novels. The people I meet don't even seem to have characters. And life seems so rich, when I look at it through his eyes, yet my own life very often appears sterile, like a bad patch of earth, as if nothing will grow there however hard I try.

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).

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

It was possible, I had realised, to resist evil but in doing so you acted alone. You stood or fell as an individual. You risked everything in the attempt: it might even be the case, I said, that evil could only be overturned by the absolute sacrifice of self. The problem was that nothing could give greater pleasure to your enemies.

The one thing you can say about people for sure, is that they'll only free themselves if freedom is in their own interest.

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.

It struck me how the human capacity for receptivity is a kind of birthright, an asset given to us in the moment of our creation by which we are intended to regulate the currency of our souls. Unless we give back to life as much as we take from it, this faculty will fail us sooner or later.

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.

Fate, he said, is only truth in its natural state. When you leave things to fate it can take a long time, he said, but its processes are accurate and inexorable.

The truth often appears in the guise of a threat to the social code. It has this in common with rudeness. When people tell the truth, they can experience a feeling of release from pretence that is perhaps similar to the release of rudeness. It might follow that people can mistake truth for rudeness, and rudeness for truth. It may only be by examining the aftermath of each that it becomes possible to prove which was which.

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.

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

Money is a country all its own.

I had found out more, I said, by listening than I had ever thought possible.

we've become convinced that if we say even a word out of place we've marked them forever, but of course that is ridiculous, and in any case, why should their lives be perfect? It is our own idea of perfection that plagues us, and it is rooted in our own desires.

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. She herself, she said, was quite willing to use others too, but she only recognised it once they had admitted this intention in themselves.

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.