Quotes from Rachel Cusk

It was an interesting thought, that stability might be seen as the product of risk; it was perhaps when people tried to keep things the same that the process of decline began.

She never said anything unless she had something important to express, which made you realise how much of what people generally said – and he included himself in this statement – was unimportant.

Writing comes out of tension, tension between what's inside and what's outside.

They walked in straight lines that the dogs scribbled all over.

It was an interesting idea, I said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need – as was generally assumed – to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility.

Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of sight.

Language is not only the medium through which existence is transacted, it constitutes our central experiences of social and moral content, of such concepts as freedom and truth, and, most importantly, of indivduality and the self; it is also a system of lies, evasions, propaganda, misrepresentation, and conformity.

Indeed, we believe everyone has a book in them - a book, not a symphony, and not even a poem. What is it, this book everyone has in them? It is, perhaps, that haunting entity, the 'true' self. The true self seeks release, not constraint.

Podría ser que solo cuando ya es demasiado tarde para escapar nos demos cuenta de que siempre hemos sido libres.

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.

Your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to be convince yourself of.

She would begin to view them ... with greater objectivity; their need for her started to look like something less discriminating, more parasitical. She felt duped by them into believing herself to be generous, tireless, inspiring, when in fact she was just a self-sacrificing victim. It was this feeling that often brought her to a position of clarity about her own life. She would start to give them less and herself more: by draining her, they created in her a new capacity for selfishness.

I didn't appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?

The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.

Among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.

I'm not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don't understand or sympathise all that much with myself.

If a man had a nasty side to his character, she wanted to get to it immediately and confront it. She didn't want it roaming unseen in the hinterland of the relationship: she wanted to provoke it, to draw it forth, lest it strike her when her back was turned.

It is hard to listen while you were talking.

He had destroyed the thing she loved most; she, in her turn, had exposed him to failure through expectations he was unable to fulfil. Without meaning to, they had found one another's deepest vulnerabilities: they had arrived, by this awful shortcut, at the place where for each of them a relationship usually ended, and set out from there.

Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn't sure I would ever discover whether this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for. All I knew was that it carried a kind of honour, if you survived it, and left you in a relationship to the truth that seemed closer, but that in fact might have been identical to the truthfulness of staying in one place.

She had to admit this journalist was one of her trickier customers, and his interviews nearly always ended with the same argument, since he seemed to take such a long time to get round to asking a question and when he did, discovered that he himself had the best answer for it.

And the blabbing, the telling, was the messiest thing of all: getting control of language was getting control of anger and shame, and it was hard, hard to turn it around, to take the mess of experience and make something coherent out of it. Only then did you know that you'd got the better of the things that had happened to you: when you controlled the story rather than it controlling you.