Quotes from Rachel Cusk

He had grown more animated while he spoke, and his desperate, wild-eyed demeanour had softened into the genial mask of the raconteur. I had the impression that these were stories he had told before and liked to tell, as though he had discovered the power and pleasure of reliving events with their sting removed. The skill, I saw, lay in skirting close enough to what appeared to be the truth without allowing what you actually felt about it to regain its power over you.

I said a lot of people spent their lives trying to make things last as a way of avoiding asking themselves whether those things were what they really wanted.

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.

Nessas linhas — que segundo o meu vizinho ele recordava até hoje — o tradutor afirma que uma frase nasce para este mundo nem boa, nem ruim, e que estabelecer sua natureza depende dos ajustes mais sutis possíveis, um processo intuitivo em que o exagero e a força são fatais.

Sometimes, I said, the loss of transition became the gain of simplicity.

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse. And what is astonishing is how much details it gathers to itself, so that nothing remains untouched by it.

É como passar em frente a uma casa onde se morou: o fato de ela ainda existir, tão concreta, faz tudo o que aconteceu desde então parecer de algum modo imaterial.

He had always worked for his father, in the family firm, but after his father's reaction to the house Pavel had decided not to do that anymore. 'All my life,' he said, 'he criticise. He criticise my work, my idea, he say he don't like the way I talk – even he criticise my wife and my children. But when he criticise my house –' Pavel pursed his lips in a smile – 'then I think, okay, is enough.

I kept looking for something else, a clue, something rotting or breeding, a layer of mystery or chaos or shame, but I didn't find it.

It was with her, after all, that his identity had been forged: if she no longer recognised him, then who was he?

Apesar disso, falou ele, eu ainda acredito no amor. O amor restaura quase tudo, e quando não consegue restaurar, leva a dor embora.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living.

Obviously, I said, she could do what she liked, and I would help her as much as I could. But I'd be wasting my time, she said. Not wasting it, I said. But spending it.

O que Ryan havia aprendido com isso era que os seus fracassos vivem voltando para você, enquanto os seus sucessos são algo de que você precisa sempre se convencer.

he felt the destruction had by now been earned in full by humanity...

Não ter uma identidade na qual se escorar tornava você um escritor melhor, você via a vida com olhos menos atormentados.

the translator says that a sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.

It was human nature, his mother said, for people to wish cruelty on one another simply because they had been shown cruelty themselves: the repetition of behavioural forms was the curious panacea with which most people sought to relieve the suffering caused by precisely those same forms.

E se tem uma coisa que eu sei é que essa escrita vem da tensão, uma tensão entre o que está dentro e o que está fora.

He had come to the conclusion that most questions were nothing more than an attempt to ascertain conformity, like rudimentary maths problems. Two and two did indeed usually equal four: it was when you gave a different answer, he had discovered, that people got upset.

Parece que o sucesso leva você para longe daquilo que conhece, disse ele, enquanto o fracasso o condena a isso.

I was eager to find a new form that was less confrontational," says Cusk. "There's not that much difference for me as a writer. It's just adjusting the frame.

Imagino que essa seja uma das definições do amor, falei, a crença em algo que só vocês dois conseguem ver

Hearing the dreadful things he said about me, it seemed to me there was nothing stable, no actual truth in all the universe, save the immutable one, that nothing exists except what one creates for oneself. To realise this is to bid a last and lonely farewell to dreams.