Quotes from Rachel Cusk

I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you've recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you're determined won't suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn't!

the artist can create outside himself the perfect replica of his own intentions. The rest of us just create a mess, or something hopelessly wooden, no matter how brilliantly we imagined it. That's

Evlilik, baÅŸka ÅŸeylerin yan?nda, bir inanç sistemidir, bir öyküdür de ve kendini son derece gerçek ÅŸeylerde göstermesine raÄŸmen, yürümesini saÄŸlayan ÅŸey eninde sonunda gizemlidir.

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

What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

The day lies ahead empty of landmarks, like a prairie, like an untraversable plain.

The prospect is exciting, for it is when the baby sleeps that I liaise, as if it were a lover, with my former life. These liaisons, though always thrilling, are often frantic. I dash about the house unable to decide what to do: to read, to work, to telephone my friends.

I imagine the corruption of myself running through her tracts, into her veins and recesses. I long to withdraw my sting from her innocent body.

And he was more Irish in America than he'd ever been at home.

If you were a woman you would certainly find your mother's life hanging over your head like a sword and you would be asking yourself what progress you had made, other than to double for yourself the work she had been expected to do and receive three times the blame for it.

Sometimes, when she has been two or more hours from the source of my body, I begin to feel a sort of elemental anxiety for her, as if she were walking a tightrope and had gone too far out, as if she could not exist for so long in time, in gravity, away from me.

I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.

But it is not merely a taboo against complaint that makes the hardship of motherhood inadmissable: like all loves this one has a conflicted core, a grain of torment that buffs the pearl of pleasure; unlike other loves, this conflict has no possibility of resolution.

The rules of writing are mostly indistinguishable from the rules of living, but this tends to be the last place people look when searching for 'there'.

and having never felt all that womanly in the first place, I believe the habit of impersonation has gone deeper in me than most, to the extent that some aspects of me do seem in fact to be male... The fact is that I received the clear message from the very beginning that everything would have been better- would have been right, would have been how it ought to be- had I been a boy.

I saw, in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state.

because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards

and I immediately felt guilty, while at the same time determined not to have something stolen from me... these two feelings, always coming in a pair...

It was as if some breeze kept wafting toward me, bearing a tormenting scent of freedom- and that same torment suddenly seemed to have bothered and pursued me for too much of my life.

why I did things I didn't want to do and couldn't do what I wanted.

UçaÄŸa binmeden önce, Londra kulüplerinden birinde, bana liberal fikirlere sahip olduÄŸu teminat? verilmiÅŸ olan bir milyarderin öÄŸle yemeÄŸi davetindeydim.

You asked me earlier,' she said to me, 'whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don't have the answer to that,' she said, 'but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner.

loss of control held new possibilities for me, as though it were itself a kind of freedom.

such strange, violent impulses were coming over me, one after another. I wanted to lie down and hammer my fists on the grass- I wanted to experience a complete loss of control.