Quotes from Rachel Cusk

Their father - her ex-husband - had relinquished all responsibility for them when the marriage ended: it almost gave him pleasure, Lawrence believed, to see them suffer, partly because their suffering dramatized his own - as bullies enjoy seeing their own fear in their victims - and partly because it was a sure-fire way of punishing (her)

I remember when we were building the second place, and had come to start calling it that in a way I knew would never change if we carried on doing it much longer, I said to him that 'second place' pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life – that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me, by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence.

At evening, with the sun no longer overhead, the air developed a kind of viscosity in which time seemed to stand very still and the labyrinth of the city, no longer bisected by light and shade and unstirred by the afternoon breezes, appeared suspended in a kind of dream, paused in an atmosphere of extraordinary pallor and thickness.

For the first time, Jeffers, I considered the possibility that art – not just L's art but the whole notion of art – might itself be a serpent, whispering in our ears, sapping away all our satisfaction and our belief in the things of this world with the idea that there was something higher and better within us which could never be equalled by what was right in front of us.

he has too much fear, so much that he is driven to enact the thing of which he is afraid, lest it should happen of its own accord. I think that if I had known, as a child, what was possible in terms of pain, I might have had much the same response.

The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don't bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.

He put out his hand and I felt his fingers circling my arm. The hand was solid, heavy, like a moulded marble hand from antiquity. I looked at it and at the dark woollen material of his coat sleeve and the mounded expanse of his shoulder. A flooding feeling of relief passed violently through me, as if I was the passenger in a car that had finally swerved away from a sharp drop.

Vanity', he said, 'is the curse of our culture; or perhaps it is simply my own persistent refusal', he said, 'to believe that artists are also human beings.

I often thought, Jeffers, during those days, of the importance of sustainability, and of how little we consider it in the decisions and actions we take. If we treated each moment as though it were a permanent condition, a place where we might find ourselves compelled to remain forever, how differently most of us would choose the things that moment contains!

Do you want the long answer or the short?" is the customary divide between explanations versus outcomes in the retelling of events. Ferrante gives us both the long answer and the short, and in doing so adumbrates the mysterious beauty and brutality of personal experience.

and his wonder at the marks experience has left on her woman's body.

I wander through the dark house, checking the locks on the doors and windows, for it feels as though the outside is coming in, as though a wall of defence has come down, as though the doors and windows may as well not be there at all.

I told her she would always be able to find a white man to be obliterated by, if that was what she decided she wanted.

asked him what it was he was writing, and his smile widened. He said, I am writing about my childhood. I was so happy as a child, he continued, and I realised a little while ago that there was nothing I wanted so much as to recall it piece by piece, with every possible detail.

and when Justine came to join us and saw the handsome stranger she blushed to the roots of her hair and I saw how beautiful she had become, and that she was in a sense finished, and I wondered whether this was how a painter might feel, looking at a canvas and realising there was no more he could or ought to do to it.

The parts of life that are suffocating', Angeliki said, 'are so often the parts that are the projection of our parents' own desires

Lo inesperado a veces parece una invitación del destino.

El éxito te aleja de las cosas que conoces, por lo visto, mientras que el fracaso te condena a ellas.

was very attracted to the hardness of Olga,' she said, 'to the hardness of her life. When she spoke about her relationship with her husband it was as though she were speaking about the parts of an engine, explaining how they worked or did not work.

I believe there are certain moments in life that don't obey the laws of time and instead last forever, and this was one of them: I am living it still, Jeffers!

how the human capacity for receptivity is a kind of birthright, an asset given to us in the moment of our creation by which we are intended to regulate the currency of our souls. Unless we give back to life as much as we take from it, this faculty will fail us sooner or later.

The baby can seem like something her husband has given her as a substitute for himself, a kind of transitional object, like a doll, for her to hold so that he can return to the world.

Only a wild animal doesn't trust anybody,' Tony said.

Supongo, añadí, que esa es una definición del amor, creer en algo que solo dos personas pueden ver.