Quotes from Rachel Cusk

You get tired of reality, and then you discover it's already gotten tired of you.

A visit to the cinema is no longer that: it is less, a tarnished thing, an alloyed pleasure.

The families are on display – it's part of how they function. Families tend to be conscious of being looked at: they perform themselves as though in expectation of a response, a judgement. I suppose they are exposing what they have created, as an artist feels compelled to do.

I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.

This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

but personally, he could never be anywhere without sooner or later wanting to go somewhere else... Likewise he had never been able to build anything permanent with other human beings.

I knew then, she said, that he was a liar, that for all his reportage and his honesty he was determined to keep himself untouched, to take without giving, to hoard himself like a greedy child.

This feeling, that she was the invisible witness to another person's solitude - a kind of ghost - nearly drove her mad for awhile.

I had been thinking lately about evil, I went on, and was beginning to realize that it was not a product of will but of it's opposite, of surrender. It represented the relinquishing of effort, the abandonment of self-discipline in the face of desire. It was, in a way, a state of passion.

Might it be true that half of freedom is the willingness to take it when it's offered?

It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.

You have to forget about the boys,' he said. 'For a while at least... They'll devour you... They can't help it. It's in their nature. They'll take it all until there's nothing left.

the translator says that a sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal. Those lines concerned the art of writing, but looking around himself in early middle age my neighbour began to see that they applied just as much to the art of living.

At the time, he had got rid of her so efficiently and so suavely that she had felt almost reassured even as she was being left behind.

while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank

He was like a cupboard rammed full with junk: when he opened the door everything fell out; it took time to reorganise himself.

That tribe was one to which nearly all the men in this country belonged, and it defined itself through a fear of women combined with an utter dependence on them.

I realised,' she said, 'that she was happy for the first time in her life, and I realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.

I have this theory that most artists never leave childhood, that you're endlessly trying to work out what happened. And leaving university and facing this idea that there is something called adult life that I was going to enter and get a job – I just couldn't. So writing became what I did as soon as I stopped studying.

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.

literature has long since discovered and documented this place of which I thought myself to be the first inhabitant,…

If you have always been criticised, from before you can remember, it becomes more or less impossible to locate yourself in the time or space before the criticism was made: to believe, in other words, that you yourself exist.

Tony has taught me that my habit of wanting to please people by saying that things are better than they are just creates disappointment, mine more than anyone else's. It's a form of control, as so much of generosity is.

Eventually I had to get up and go downstairs, and there were all the usual chores to do and all the enacting of oneself that living with other people requires