Quotes from Rachel Cusk

Through the windows you could hear the sounds of footsteps on the cobbles below and the hiss and whir of bicycles passing in their shoals and drifts; and most of all you could hear the bells that rang unendingly from the town's many churches, striking not just the hours, but the quarter and half hours, so that each segment of time became a seed of silence that then blossomed, filling the air with what almost seemed a kind of self-description.

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

find it difficult to answer my own needs. The sight of other people getting what they want, jostling and demanding things, makes me decide I would rather go without.

It's a question that begs an answer, and yet there is no clear and satisfying answer, except to say that this aura of male freedom belongs likewise to most representations of the world and of our human experience within it, and that as women we grow accustomed to translating it into something we ourselves can recognise.

The fact is that I received the clear message from the very beginning that everything would have been better – would have been right, would have been how it ought to be – had I been a boy.

I saw, in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state, which had never truly been revealed to me before.

it means, simply, that our manner of life is dishonest, that it offers too few opportunities for self-expression, and that, for some people, there is too great a disjuncture between how things seem and how they actually feel.

It's limiting, Louis went on, to be known: you can't behave without inhibition. You can go to the ends of the earth but if you meet someone there who knows your name, you might as well have stayed at home.

He often caught himself living in the mistaken belief that transformation was the same thing as progress. Things could look very different while remain the same: time could seem to have altered everything, without changing the thing that needed to change.

Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realise that you'd better stop predicting what they're going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you.

Looking after children is a low-status occupation. It is isolating, frequently boring, relentlessly demanding and exhausting.

Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves. I was left with a kind of blankness, Jeffers, from those years of being afraid.

Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again.

If you were unfamiliar with the political situation in our country, you might think you were witnessing not the machinations of a democracy but the final surrender of personal consciousness into the public domain.

You know, Jeffers, that I am interested in the existence of things before our knowledge of them – partly because I have trouble believing that they do exist!

When finally we are able to converse, I find her decided, fully formed, already beyond the reach of persuasion. My relationship with her is like my relationship with anybody: it takes the form of a search for oneness, a oneness lost but haunting with the prospect of its recapture.

So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.

The criticism is more real than you are: it seems, in fact, to have created you. I believe a lot of people walk around with this problem in their heads, and it leads to all kinds of trouble – in my case, it led to my body and my mind getting divorced from each other right at the start, when I was only a few years old.

I am a good student and have been unable to prevent myself from learning his taste very thoroughly, to the extent that I have come to know what he wants before he even wants it himself, and in the matter of women I have become positively prophetic, almost to the extent that I see them with his eyes and feel his own desire for them.

But my point is that there's something that paintings and other created objects can do to give you some relief. They give you a location, a place to be, when the rest of the time the space has been taken up because the criticism got there first.

He had got into this habit, which more or less dispensed with the necessity for remembering anything, not because he tended to be forgetful but because his capacity for holding on to information, however useless or trivial, would otherwise have kept him in a state of constant distraction.

that awful human type of sadness.

So much of power lies in the ability to see how willing other people are to give it to you.

He doesn't comment and he doesn't criticise and this puts him in an ocean of silence compared to most people. Sometimes his silence makes me feel invisible, not to him but to myself, because as I've told you I've been criticised all my life: it's how I've come to know that I'm there.