Quotes from Rachel Cusk

Ele não olhou para mim nem sequer uma vez, pois os momentos em que as pessoas estão demonstrando o próprio poder sobre as outras são aqueles em que têm menos consciência delas.

I guess it reminded me of having a kid,' she said finally. 'You survive your own death,' she added, 'and then there's nothing left to do except talk about it.

Tive a sensação de que poderia nadar quilômetros, até o alto-mar; um desejo de liberdade, um impulso de me mover me puxava como se fosse um fio amarrado no meu peito. Era um impulso que eu conhecia bem, e havia aprendido que não era o chamado de um mundo maior, como eu antes acreditava que fosse. Era simplesmente um desejo de escapar do que eu tinha. O fio não conduzia a lugar nenhum exceto a vastidões de anonimato que não paravam de crescer.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative, but in this story the two poles had become dissociated and ascribed separate, warring identities.

Joskus minun vain täytyy saada puhua jotta tuntisin itseni todelliseksi, ja toivoisin että sinäkin puhuisit minulle." Hän makasi vaiti pimeässä ja tuijotti kattoon. Sitten hän sanoi: "Minusta tuntuu kuin sydämeni puhuisi sinulle koko ajan.

The thing is,' he said,' 'that kind of life - the parties, the drugs, the staying up all night - is basically repetitive. It doesn't get you anywhere and it isn't meant to, because what it represents is freedom... And to stay free... you have to reject change.

Muutoksen ja toiston kaava on niin tiukasti yhteydessä tietynlaiseen harmoniaan elämässä, ja vapauden harjoittaminen on alisteista sille aivan kuin opinkappaleelle. Muutoksia täytyy annostella kohtuudella kuin vahvaa viiniä.

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.

All she wishes is for her life to be integrated, to be one thing, rather than an eternal series of oppositions that confound her whichever way she looks.

She turned her head, still smiling, and looked down the hill towards the city, where cars were moving in swarms along the roads beside the river. The distinctive shape of her nose, which from the front slightly marred her fine-featured face, in profile attained beauty: it was upturned and snub-ended and had a deep V in its bridge, as though someone had drawn it with a certain licence, to make a point about the relationship between destiny and form.

As for the weight, he said, you rarely saw yourself with your clothes off, or anyone else without theirs for that matter. He remembered the feeling of estrangement from his own body, as it laboured in the damp, spore-ridden climate of the house; his clogged lungs and itchy skin, his veins full of sugar and fat, his wobbling flesh shrouded in uncomfortable clothing.

there was no reason, he said, to trouble myself on that account, since research had proved that parental influence over personality outcomes was virtually nil. A parent's effect lay almost entirely in the quality of his or her nurture and of the home environment, much as a plant will wilt or thrive according to where it is placed and how it is cared for, while its organic structure remains inviolable.

The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it. True art means seeking to capture the unreal.

maybe it's just you become disinhibited. He'd felt this last night, socializing with people in their twenties. He'd forgotten how phsysically shy they were.

it felt like he was acting a part in a play: other people spoke their lines and he spoke his, and everything that happened and everywhere he went felt unreal somehow, like scripted events unfolding on a stage set

Hearing the dreadful things he had 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.

I once told you, Jeffers, about the time I met the devil on a train leaving Paris, and about how after that meeting the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things rose up and disgorged itself over every part of life. It was like a contamination, Jeffers: it got into everything and turned it bad. I don't think I realised how many parts of life there were, until each one of them began to release its capacity for badness.

suppose it's a bit like marriage, he said. You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that's never repeated. It's the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground.

the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them.

The trouble was, I had the dumb loyalty of a dog.

I intimated for the first time the possibility of destruction, the destruction of what I had built; not, I assure you, for his sake, but for the possibility he embodied – which had never once occurred

Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?

I have wanted to be free my whole life and I haven't managed to liberate my smallest toe. I

Once Agnes had been in love and since then she had been in pain.