Quotes from Rachel Cusk

My neighbour from the plane was a good foot shorter than me

It had never even occurred to him that the relationship could end. He remembered hit coming, a feeling of incipient coldness, like the first hint of winter, a bewildering sensation of wrongness, as though something had broken deep down in the engine of his life. For a while, he pretended that he couldn't hear it, couldn't feel it, but nonetheless his existence with Marc inexorably ground to a halt.

what] I couldn't understand was how the simple revelation of personal truth could lead to so much suffering and cruelty... I was naive to expect that other people would merely allow me to change when those changes directly interfered with their own interests.

I didn't go mad,' I said. 'Though I suppose I still might, one day.

Is it wrong to want things that you can't give me?

We invent these systems with the aim of ensuring fairness, she said, and yet the human situation is so complex that it always evades our attempts to encompass it.

We live with an almost superstitious belief in our own differences, she said, and Luis has shown that those differences are not the result of some divine mystery but are merely the consequence of our lack of empathy, which if we had it would enable us to see that in fact we are all the same.

Yet the illusion of meaning recurred, much as you tried to resist it: like childhood, I said, which we treat as an explanatory text rather than merely as a formative experience of powerlessness.

He was all for people speaking their minds but it did make him miss the time when what was beneath the surface had been permitted to stay there.

he was observing something while I, evidently, was entirely immersed in being it.

Abraçou o conceito inteiro quase da noite para o dia: podia decidir como queria ser e então sê-lo. Não existia predestinação alguma; agora entendia que aquela noção de si mesmo como uma sina e uma maldição que havia pairado como uma mortalha sobre toda a sua vida podia ficar para trás.

The truth was I had always assumed that pleasure was being held in store for me, like something I was amassing in a bank account, but by the time I came to ask for it I discovered the store was empty. It appeared that it was a perishable entity, and that I should have taken it a little earlier.

Tudo que sabe é que não se reconhece mais nesses contos, embora recorde a sensação explosiva de escrevê-los, algo dentro dele se adensando e fazendo uma força irresistível para nascer. Nunca mais teve essa sensação; chega a pensar que, para continuar escritor, teria de se tornar escritor novamente, quando poderia com a mesma facilidade se tornar astronauta ou fazendeiro.

I remember always being frightened that one day she would eat me

Mothers are such liars,' he said. 'Language is all they have. They fill you up with language if you let them.

Why do you play at being a woman?

I don't know,' I said. 'I don't think I know how to be a woman. I believe that no one ever showed me.' 'It isn't a question of showing,' he said. 'It's a question of being permitted.

by revealing her true beauty and potential, she was somehow less safe than she had been before. I couldn't bear the thought of the hopes and possibilities that might come from this revelation, and what their crushing might do to her. Safer to go around in a Mother Hubbard, not risking anything!

I was working, somehow, to free her from myself, when it appeared that what she needed was to take some of me along with her!

I saw him wandering forlornly in the garden and I went out to find him, since I felt sorry for him by this point and wondered whether I should have done more to look after him. How guilty a man like that can make you feel, Jeffers!

Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be. An image is also eternal, but it has no dealings with time – it disowns it, as it has to do, for how could one ever in the practical world scrutinise or comprehend the balance sheet of time that brought about the image's unending moment?

my individuality had tormented me my whole life with its demand to be recognised.

This feeling was perhaps what had once driven his people to roam the world, seeking the home that would cure them of it. It may be the case that to find that home is to end one's quest, I said, but it is with the feeling of displacement itself that the true intimacy develops and that constitutes, as it were, the story.

Oh, why was living so painful, and why were we given these moments of health, if only to realise how burdened with pain we were the rest of the time? Why was it so difficult to live day after day with people and still remember that you were distinct from them and that this was your one mortal life?