Quotes from Rachel Cusk

you had said those things to him, you understand, you would have heard some truths in return. If you had been frank you would have elicited frankness.

There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.

That idea – of one's own life as something that had already been dictated – was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy.

What is the point of self pity if there is was nobody to pity you for it?

La personalidad debía adaptarse a las nuevas circunstancias lingüísticas para crearse de nuevo

what is the point of self pity if there was nobody to pity you for it?

But I do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also – as you say, by the same logic – something I will feel driven to provoke.

the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter

Es dificilísimo que hasta los más bondadosos, los que más te quieren, se tomen tus intereses verdaderamente en serio, porque suelen aconsejarte desde una vida más segura y más aislada que la tuya, en la que escapar no es una realidad, sino algo con lo que de vez en cuando sueñan.

the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women and that you are always trying to purge with what you call frankness. As soon as you cease to be frank, you see a stain, you are forced to acknowledge imperfection, and you want only to run away and hide in shame.

while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable. I asked her whether she lived in Manchester, and she said no, she had just been up there to teach another course, and had had to fly straight from there to here.

The polarisation of man and woman was a structure, a form: she had only felt it once it was gone, and it almost seemed as though the collapse of that structure, that equipoise, was responsible for the extremity that followed

In other words, it was nobody's fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.

He had, he said, attended every single event at the conference, even those conducted in languages he didn't understand: he felt the organisers would have been disappointed in him otherwise.

but I suspect he feels that if he gave his attention to a book and lost himself in it, he might never be found again, and the world he is trying to hold on to might spin out of his control.

My husband Tony sometimes says to me that I underestimate my own power, and I wonder whether that makes living more hazardous for me than for other people, the way it's dangerous for those who lack the ability to feel pain.

She was stepping off the pavement into the road and she felt it, a sudden sense of dislocation, almost a sensation of something giving way. She waited for the feeling to pass but it didn't: she returned home with it, and when she woke the next morning it was still there. She couldn't, as she said, give a name to it, but one consequence of it was that from that day she felt she was watching life from the outside rather than being part of it.

Now and again,' she continued presently, 'I have met people who have freed themselves from their family relationships. Yet there often seems to be a kind of emptiness in that freedom, as though in order to dispense with their relatives they have had to dispense with a part of themselves. Like the man trapped in the glacier who cut off his own arm,' she said, with a faint smile.

The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn't sure.

Whatever power it is that I have, it's nothing compared to the power of stupidity. That was and remains my reasoning, even though I could have taken the opportunity to live an idyll here of easeful impotence.

I remember, when my own children were born feeling a great awareness of this new, foreign aspect of myself that was in me and yet did not seem to be of me. It was as though I had suddenly acquired the ability to speak Russian: I didn't know where my knowledge of it had come from.

That's all I've managed as far as freedom is concerned, to get rid of the people and things I don't like. After that, there isn't all that much left!

What is history other than memory without pain?' he said, smiling pleasantly and folding his small white hands together on the table in front of him. 'If people want to recapture some of those hardships, these days they go to the gym.