Quotes from Rachel Cusk

I said I wasn't sure: when people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. But it didn't necessarily follow that to stay free was to stay the same. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them. Not changing, in other words, deprived them of what they'd gone to such trouble to attain.

he observed that in the current situation the possibility of destruction seemed genuinely to be upon us, to the extent that he couldn't see what move on the chess board would get us out of this corner.

Benim aç?mdan, kad?nlarla erkeklerin öyküsü, son tahlilde bir savaÅŸ öyküsüdür.

sea lo que sea lo que queramos pensar de nosotros mismos, no somos sino el resultado del trato que hemos recibido por parte de los demás.

I said that while her story suggested that human lives could be governed by the laws of narrative, and all the notions of retribution and justice that narrative lays claim to, it was in fact merely her interpretation of events that created that illusion.

It may be the case, she said, that it is only when it is too late to escape that we see we were free all along.

They thought her strange, she knew. They would not blame the difficult world. Everyone else dealt with it. Why couldn't she?

History goes over the top like a steamroller, she said, crushing everything in its path, whereas childhood kills the roots. And that is the poison, she said, that seeps into the soil.

In fact, he went on, you could see the whole history of capitalism as a history of combustion, not just the burning of substances that have lain in the earth for millions of years but also of knowledge, ideas, culture and indeed beauty – anything, in other words, that has taken time to develop and accrue.

which goes to show, he said, that we examine least what has formed us the most, and instead find ourselves driven blindly to re-enact it. Maybe it's only in our injuries, he said, that the future can take root.

I]t has struck me that along with all other losses, I might lose friendship, too. I am not equal anymore to the people that I know, and what is friendship but a celebration of equality?

I am sure there must be a word for it in German, something compound like lifegrief that would translate as outpouring of sorrow at the human condition, for I do not entirely believe that it is a digestive malaise.

Like God, my father expressed himself through absence: it was easier, perhaps, to be grateful to someone who wasn't there.

a saddening thought, she said, that when a group of women get together, far from advancing the cause of femininity, they end up pathologising it.

He spoke a refined and formal kind of English that did not seem wholly natural, as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint. I asked him what his nationality was. 'I was sent to an English boarding school at the age of seven,' he replied. 'You might say I have the mannerisms of an Englishman but the heart of a Greek. I am told,' he added, 'it would be much worse the other way around.

I'm not remotely interested in me as a subject," she said. "I'm interested in me as an object, and my honesty isn't brave, because it's not for me, it's not about me. It's just that I'm all I've got.

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.

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.

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. It is almost a tragedy, he said, that the same people who are capable of wanting the jacaranda tree and understanding its beauty are incapable of nurturing one themselves.

Yet I believe, as I say, that it was precisely this underhand act that gave birth to her vitriol, for people are at their least forgiving when they themselves have been underhand, as though they would exact their innocence from you at any price.

Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private.

I heard the students speaking and wondered how they could believe in human reality sufficiently to construct fantasies about it.

The marriage was already unhappy, however, the father's ferocity and the mother's intransigence being more than cosmetic. Theirs was a tremendous battle of wills, in which no one ever succeeded in separating the combatants; except, very briefly, when they died.

At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.