Quotes from Rachel Cusk

Even the social life she'd envied had started to pall on her, the shallowness of it, the same competitive faces in the same rooms, the repetitiveness and lack of growth, the lack of tenderness or intimacy.

Not to have been born in a woman's body was a piece of luck in the first place: he couldn't see his own freedom because he couldn't conceive of how elementally it might have been denied him... The wounded don't survive in nature: a woman could never throw herself on fate and expect to come out of it intact. She has to connive at her own survival...

Change is also loss

it felt, almost, as though I were looking at it all through the wrong end of a telescope and seeing things from a greater distance than I usually did, perhaps because I myself was not especially the focus of anyone's attention.

He began to ask me questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.

It was her own capacity for story telling that made her see her own hand in what happened around her.

I said I wasn't sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world---whatever its features---was catastrophic.

It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.

One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying - it seemed to me – was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction that they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become – to put it bluntly - anathema to me.

But I quickly came to see, she said, that in fact there was nothing worse than to be an average white male of average talents and intelligence: even the most oppressed housewife, she said, is closer to the drama and poetry of life than he is, because as Louise Bourgeois shows us she is capable at least of holding more than one perspective.

As Sophocles said it – how dreadful knowledge of the truth is, when the truth can't help you!

He has not asked them one question about themselves: she and Claudia do not exist for him, they are just lines of perspective, ways for him to measure his location in space.

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.

replied that I wasn't sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a 'real' self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn't actually exist.

This feeling, of being negated at the same time as I was exposed, had had a particularly powerful effect on me, I said.

I said that I thought most of us didn't know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.

ellipsis, he'd been told, could literally be translated as 'to hide behind silence'. It's fascinating stuff, he said.

She herself, she said, had visited the very depths of disillusionment in the male character by being honest in precisely this way: men who had claimed one minute to be dying of love for her were openly insulting her the next

mutual frankness that she could work out who she herself was and what she actually wanted.

And saying you love him is the same as saying you don't want to know what he really thinks of you. If you talked to him,' she said, 'you would find out.

The one thing you can say about people for sure,' Ryan said, 'is that they'll only free themselves if freedom is in their own interest.

You know what it's like,' he said. 'You earn just enough to get by but at the end of the day there's nothing left mentally, and so you cling to the job even harder.

That quality, I said, could almost be called suspense, and it seemed to me to be generated by the belief that our lives were governed by mystery, when in fact that mystery was merely the extent of our self-deception over the fact of our own mortality.

I said it must be interesting to be able to see people without them seeing you. It seemed to me that children are often treated in the same way, as witnesses whose presence was somehow not taken into account.