Quotes from Rachel Cusk

It was hard to listen while you were talking. I had found out more by listening than I had ever thought possible.

My difficulty, I saw then, had always lain in finding a way to give back all the impressions I had received, to render an account to a god who had never come and never come, despite my desire to surrender everything that was stored inside me. Yet even so my receptive faculty had not, for some reason, failed me: I had remained a devourer while yearning to become a creator

We live with an almost superstitious belief in our own differences, she said, and Luís has shown that those differences are not the result of some divine mystery but are merely the consequence of our lack of empathy, which if we had it would enable us to see that in fact we are all the same.

Como en el amor, continué, que te entiendan crea el temor a que no vuelvan a entenderte jamás.

his whole life, as far as she could see, consisted of writerly sinecures and engagements, like a whole life of eating only desserts. She wasn't sure it was healthy.

Besides, Clara needed relatives: it was Diane's view that bringing up a completely undamaged child was in bad taste.

I hadn't realised, I said, how much of navigation is the belief in progress, and the assumption of fixity in what you have left behind.

I am one of those who believes that without suffering there can be no art

There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain.

I was used to the sound and was barely startled by it, and in that half-conscious state I could hear it as all strange things. Sometimes I liked to imagine, I told him, that it was the sound of wicked men blowing their brains out, one after another. 'Huh,' he said, with a grudging half-smile. 'Wicked men don't do that. Anyway, you'd probably like those men if you got to know them. Nothing evil ever dies. Especially not of remorse.

The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public: when peace becomes war, when love turns to hatred, something is born into the world, a force of pure mortality.

What was striking was the sheer negative capability of their former intimacy:

we drifted around and around, with the sun on our faces and our bodies hanging like three white roots beneath the water. I can see us there still,' he said, 'for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward -- or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exist in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal -- or can be.

And I realised eventually, I said, that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more, that was the point. There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.

Er wisse nicht, das wolle er an dieser Stelle betonen, ob er jemals wieder ein Buch schreiben werde; sein Verhältnis zur Welt sei unzureichend dynamisch.

To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet. To be myself I must let the baby cry, must forestall her hunger or leave her for evenings out, must forget her in order to think about other things. To succeed in being one means to fail at being the other.

We are all, in our journey through life, navigating toward some special, dreamed-of place, and if for some reason we are thrown off course, or the place itself, once reached, is not what we hoped for, then we must strike out at whatever risk to set things right.

What I lived as feminism were in fact the male values my parents, among others, well-meaningly bequeathed me—the cross-dressing values of my father, and the anti-feminine values of my mother. So I am not a feminist. I am a self-hating transvestite.

I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn't, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities.

The sun showed like a scimitar at the edge of the rooftops.

They didn't love or hate anything, or at least so that you could see; it was just that they were in the habit of never showing their hand.

My daughter emanates unprocessed human need where the world is at its most civilised;

Later, at the train station before she leaves, my sister says to me: you have to learn to hide what you feel from the children. They will feel what they think you feel. That are only reflections of you. I don't believe that, I say. If they think you're happy, they'll be happy, my sister says. Their feelings are their own, I say.