Quotes from Rachel Cusk

Life is sending you in one direction and you're pulling away in another, like you're disagreeing with your own destiny, like who you are is in disagreement with who they say you are.

At home she generally avoided doing housework, she went on, because those kinds of chores made her feel so unimportant that she wouldn't have been able to write anything afterwards. She supposed they made her feel like an ordinary woman, when most of the time she didn't think about being a woman, or perhaps didn't even believe she was one, because at home it wasn't a subject that came up.

In marriage you go away from other people, but at the end of marriage they come out to welcome you back. This is civilisation, she says. The worst thing that happened to you has brought out the best in them.

The problem is, they said, he has no fear. But it seems to me that exactly the reverse is true: he has too much fear, so much that he is driven to enact the thing of which he is afraid, lest it should happen of its own accord.

Cruelty is an aspect of civilisation, I say. Cruelty is part of power; it's like the army; you bring it out when you need to. … What he calls cruelty I call the discipline of self-criticism. A woman who loves herself is unprotected. She will be invaded, put in chains, left there in the primordial swamp to love her heart out.

Wintry Peacock". It is an autobiographical

What kind of love was this, that needed the love object domesticated and locked up? And if there was love being handed out, why wasn't she getting any?

My response to these early cries, in other words, is formative. I should do nothing that I don't intend to continue doing, should make no false moves, lest I find myself co-habiting in the months and years to come with the terrible embodiment of my weaknesses, a creature formed from the patchwork of my faults held together by the glue of her own apparently limitless, denatured, monstrous will.

She looks out of the window of her apartment at the women running in the park, always running, and she asks herself whether they are running towards something or away from it. If she looks long enough she sees that they are simply running around in circles.

Writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in an animal's fur: the deeper they're buried the better.

When I think of my child I am seized by the desire to make good all my former powerlessness, to love as I would like to be loved: mercifully, completely, unambiguously. Her experience of this love is for the moment rather shady and unclear. I want to write it down and put it in a drawer for her, like the title deeds to something, so that she will have some proof, some inheritance, should something happen to me before I get a chance to explain it to her.

He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a value for her too in his attention, though its consequence is her captivity.

I would like', she resumed, 'to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown, where I have no identity and no associations.

If he could only love what he did not know, and be loved in return on that same basis, then knowledge became an inexorable disenchantment, for which the only cure was to fall in love with someone new.

She had sat there, she said, and thought about her own lifelong habit of explaining herself, and she thought about this power of silence, which put people out of one another's reach.

I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.

Guiltily I would think that I had baptised her early in the eternal doctrine of human pain, of things passing, of what was loved vanishing, never to return.

Love is more respectable, more practical, more hardworking than I had ever suspected, but it lies close to the power to destroy. I have never before remotely felt myself to possess that power, and I am as haunted by it as if it were a gun in a nearby drawer.

There was a great difference, I said, between the things that I wanted and the things I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all. (pp 171)

Could it be true that one has to experience in order to understand? I have always denied this idea, and yet of motherhood, for me at least, it seems to be the case.

he asks herself whether they are running towards something or away from it. If she looks long enough she sees that they are simply running around in circles.

For most of the people she knew, people in their forties, this was a time of softening and expanding, of expectations growing blurred, of running a little to seed or to fat after the exhaustion of the chase: she saw them beginning to relax and make themselves comfortable in their lives.

What she couldn't stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily.

My father, a man, advanced male values to us, his daughters. And my mother, a woman, did the same.