Quotes from Rachel Cusk

I read somewhere that a space station is always slowly falling back to earth, and that every few months or so a rocket has to be sent to push it back out again. In rather the same way, a woman is forever dragged at by an imperceptible force of biological conformism; her life is relentlessly iterative; it requires energy to keep her in orbit. Year after year she'll do it, but if one year the rocket doesn't come then down she'll go.

Is it male attention I want, or male authority?

There have doubtless been a number of such incidents, but this one has stayed in my mind. One reason, I suppose, has to do with narrative, with the fact that the meaning of this woman's life was entirely altered by a single event at its end: this is not how stories generally work.

exalted sense of possibility I felt... intimated for the first time the possibility of destruction... not for his sake... but for the possibility he embodied of violent change

I have wanted to be free my whole life... the germ of a possibility that was soon to grow and rage like a cancer through my life... on the brink of rebellion whose impossible yearnings...

What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.

Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one's own destiny by what one doesn't notice or feel compassion for; that what you don't know and don't make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.

The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite – and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

There was a great difference, I said, between the things 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.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.

Some people write simply because they don't know how to live in the moment and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.

Loneliness, she said, is when nothing will stick to you, when nothing will thrive around you, when you start to think that you kill things just by being there.

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 exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be.

She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation.

I mean, you never hear someone say they wanted to have an affair but they couldn't find the time, do you?

Whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others have treated us.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

You could spend your whole life', she said, 'trying to trace events back to your own mistakes.

the problem with being honest, he said, is that you're slow to realize that other people can lie.

Music,' she said, in a languorous and dreamlike manner. 'Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private.

And of those two ways of living - living in the moment and living outside it - which was more real?