Quotes from Rachel Cusk

perhaps because I myself was not especially the focus of anyone's attention.

It was dark by now, and electric light rained down in crossing lance-shapes through the glass ceiling from the buildings outside while the black body of the river undulated just beyond the windows, with the human figures inside interposed in reflection on its churning surfaces.

But for once I thought, let someone else do it! And that is how we lose control over our own destinies.

I was more terrified than ever; but perhaps,' he said, 'the best way to confront our fears is to put them in costume, so to speak; to translate them, for the simple act of translation very often renders things harmless.

The second place was one such bridge, and Tony's silence ran undisrupted beneath it like a river.

built things that had flourished, had together expanded the sum of what they were and what they had; life had responded willingly to them, had treated them abundantly, and this – he now saw – was what had given him the confidence to break it all, break it with what now seemed to him to be an extraordinary casualness, because he thought there would be more. More what? I asked.

It's frightening to live on luck

A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn't buy your way into it.

More – life,' he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. 'And more affection,' he added, after a pause. 'I wanted more affection.

The windows were one of Tony's Certainties, and I disagreed with him and stood against him over them from the beginning, because I believe a house ought first and foremost to be cosy and to allow you to forget the outside when you're in it.

For me, there was no escaping my physical body. But he could simply run away!

He offered a stool next to his, but I went and sat in the old ladder-back chair beside the empty fire instead, a piece of furniture I have held on to throughout my adult life and that for reasons I have forgotten I had chosen to put there, in the second place. Perhaps it had reminded me too much of the life before Tony

Theo said it sounded like the problem was that she had chosen the wrong dog in the first place. He himself had a pug, he said, and he had never experienced any difficulties.

and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.

you survived your own death and there was nothing left to do but to talk about it, to strangers on a plane or whoever would listen

I feel like my heart is talking to you all the time.

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

I have often looked at photographs of writers in their elegant book-lined studies and marvelled at what seems to me a mirage of sorts, the near-perfect alignment of seeming with being, the convincing illusion of mental processes on public display, as though writing a book were not the work of someone capable of all the shame and deviousness and cold-heartedness in the world.

the idea of L ever coming to where I was and looking at it through his own eyes, which would have taken that consummation to a point of finality and given me – or so I believed – a version of the freedom I had wanted my whole life.

I remember from childhood how easy it was to imagine, how hard to create: the difference between what I could conceive of and what I could actually do was bewildering. In adulthood I have learned that to envisage is nothing: success is a hard currency, earned by actual excellence.

Perhaps it follows, he said, that people who live in the sun don't take responsibility for their own happiness.

The closest most people come to it is in having a child. And nowhere are our mistakes and limitations more plainly written than there!

it is the very thing you don't see, the thing you take for granted, that deceives you. And how can you even know you have taken something for granted until it is no longer there?

I was surprised by the discovery that Gerard had a child. In the time when I knew him he had been so far from resolving the difficulties of his own childhood that it was hard to believe he was now a father.