Rachel Cusk quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Rachel Cusk on Wise Famous Quotes.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.

Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.

We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.

I'm waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.

The British have always made terrible parents.

To be optimistic about something that is absolutely unknown to you is unfounded.

Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.

Modern morality is all about perception.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.

I didn't appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?

Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back.

Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.

Money is a country all its own,

I mean, you never hear someone say they wanted to have an affair but they couldn't find the time, do you?

What compromises women - babies, domesticity, mediocrity - compromises writing even more.

I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.

Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.

I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.

They walked in straight lines that the dogs scribbled all over.

I am a good and interested mother - which has surprised me.

I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.

Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.

A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn't buy your way into it.

A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.

What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.

Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.

Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.

There is always shame in the creation of an object for the public gaze.

Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.

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

It seems success takes you away from what you know, [Athenian plane passenger] said, while failure condemns you to it.

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.

And of those two ways of living - living in the moment and living outside it - which was more real?

It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.

So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation.

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

I absolutely don't dislike children - I would choose their company over adult company any time.

And he was more Irish in America than he'd ever been at home.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

Yet I still, he said, believe in love. Love restores almost everything, and where it can't restore, it takes away the pain.

But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.