Quotes from Rachel Cusk

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.

When the traffic is at a standstill, some of the smaller cottages look dwarfed by the cars. It is possible for the people in the cottages and the cars to look at one another.

I said that I lived in London, having very recently moved from the house in the countryside where I had lived alone with my children for the past three years, and where for the seven years before that we had lived together with their father. 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.

She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she felt herself summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when 'Anne's life' just about covered it.

It [beauty] had always felt like something I might find, or something I had temporarily lost, or something I was pursuing.

The unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate.

Il destino, ha detto, non è che verità allo stato naturale.

And it was the same with my first wife and me,' he said. 'We hit a bump in the road, and over we went.' It had, he now realised, been a happy relationship, the most harmonious of his life. He and his wife had met and got engaged as teenagers; they had never argued, until the argument in which everything between them was broken.

She was particularly jealous of the eldest, a boy, whose every movement she criticized. She watched him with an obsessiveness that was quite extraordinary to behold, and she was always putting him to work around the house, blaming him for the smallest evidence of disorder and insisting on her right to punish him for what she alone thought of as misdemeanor.

something so small that it would cause passers-by to briefly glance at it and therefore unconsciously decrease their speed, could over time result in the whole motorway coming to a standstill in another place miles away.

Let's just say that drama became something very real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out on the wold. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her. I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself.

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.

It was nearly thirty years since his first marriage ended, and the further he got from that life, the more real it became to him. Or not real exactly, he said – what had happened since had been real enough. The word he was looking for was authentic: his first marriage had been authentic in a way that nothing ever had again. The older he got, the more it represented to him a kind of home, a place to which he yearned to return.

I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

To be led and then discarded by one's urges...

I imagined her in the dusk of a Paris Garden, untouched in her white dress, and object thirsting if not for interpretation then for the fulfillment at least of an admiring human gaze, like a painting hanging on a wall, waiting.

Puede haber amor sin celos, pero no sin temores» MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

a feeling of impulses under continual restraint.

I said it was true that the question of whether to leave or remain was one we usually asked ourselves in private, to the extent that it could almost be said to constitute the innermost core of self-determination.

Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.

She was, I saw, goading herself on: she wanted to Traverse boundaries, as though to prove to herself that she was free.

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

No, I don't want to be completed. I prefer to try outrunning whatever's after me. I prefer to stay out, like kids on a summer evening stay out, and won't come in when they're called. I don't want to go in.

while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.