Quotessence
Home / Authors / Rachel Cusk Books
Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Books

Novelist

Transit

A source page for quotes linked to Rachel Cusk.

0 quotes

Outline

A source page for quotes linked to Rachel Cusk.

0 quotes

Second Place

A source page for quotes linked to Rachel Cusk.

0 quotes

Kudos

A source page for quotes linked to Rachel Cusk.

0 quotes

Parade

A source page for quotes linked to Rachel Cusk.

0 quotes

Related Quotes

“Cuando dos personas se casan jóvenes, Jeffers, todo nace de la raíz compartida de su juventud y es imposible decir qué parte es de uno y cuál de la otra persona. Por eso, cuando esas dos personas intentan separarse, el corte afecta desde la raíz hasta la punta de las ramas, y el proceso se convierte en una carnicería que parece dejar a la persona reducida a la mitad de lo que era antes. Pero cuando uno se casa más tarde, la relación es más parecida al encuentro de dos cosas distintas ya formadas, a una especie de choque de la una con la otra, parecido a dos masas de tierra que chocan y se fusionan la una con la otra a o largo del tiempo geológico, dejando la dramática costura de las cordilleras como prueba de su fusión.”

LoveDesireBreakup
Book:Second Place
Create image

“Cuando dos personas se casan jóvenes, Jeffers, todo nace de la raíz compartida de su juventud y es imposible decir qué parte es de uno y cuál de la otra persona. Por eso, cuando esas dos personas intentan separarse, el corte afecta desde la raíz hasta la punta de las ramas, y el proceso se convierte en una carnicería que parece dejar a la persona reducida a la mitad de lo que era antes. Pero cuando uno se casa más tarde, la relación es más parecida al encuentro de dos cosas distintas ya formadas, a una especie de choque de la una con la otra, parecido a dos masas de tierra que chocan y se fusionan la una con la otra a lo largo del tiempo geológico, dejando la dramática costura de las cordilleras como prueba de su fusión.”

LoveDesireBreakup
Book:Second Place
Create image

“Yet I knew that nothing different or particularly important would happen when he got back. It was merely that something was being stretched to breaking point by his absence, something to do with belief: it was as though our ability to believe in ourselves, in our home and our family and in who we said we were was being worn so thin it might give way entirely. I remember the pressing feeling of reality, just under the surface of things, like a secret I was struggling to contain... I realized that I didn't want to be there, in that room. I wanted to go out and walk across the fields in the dark, or go to a city where they are was excitement and glamour or be anywhere where the compulsion of waiting wasn't lying on me like lead. I wanted to be free.”

TruthFamilyHonestyDivorce
Book:Transit
Create image

“All writers, Julian went on, are attention seekers: why else would we be sitting up here on this stage? The fact is, he said, no one took enough notice of us when we were small and now we're making them pay for it. Any writer who denied the childish element of revenge in what they did was, as far as he was concerned, a liar. Writing was just a way of taking justice into your own hands. If you wanted the proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty.”

TruthMotivationHonestyRevengeWriters
Book:Transit
Create image

“She would begin to view them ... with greater objectivity; their need for her started to look like something less discriminating, more parasitical. She felt duped by them into believing herself to be generous, tireless, inspiring, when in fact she was just a self-sacrificing victim. It was this feeling that often brought her to a position of clarity about her own life. She would start to give them less and herself more: by draining her, they created in her a new capacity for selfishness.”

WomenSelf Love
Book:Transit
Create image

“It was never said of history, for instance, that it shouldn’t be talked about; on the contrary, in terms of history silence was forgetting, and it was the thing people feared most of all when it was their own history that was at risk of being forgotten. And history, really, was invisible, though its monuments still stood. The making of the monuments was half of it, but the rest was interpretation. Yet there was something worse than forgetting, which was misrepresentation, bias, the selective presentation of events. The truth had to be represented: it couldn’t just be left to represent itself, as for instance she had left it to the police after the incident, and found herself more or less sidelined.”

PeopleHistoryStoryForgetting
Book:Outline
Create image

“t’s suggested that the ultimate fulfillment of a conscious being lay not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and corporative it might almost be said to represent the entwining of two selves. This notion, of the unitary self being broken down, consciousness not as an imprisonment in one’s own perceptions but rather as something more intimate and less divided, or universality that could come from shared experience at the highest level.”

LoveRelationship
Book:Transit
Create image

“What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing - no narrative dramas - to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time.”

Loneliness
Book:Transit
Create image

“What she did learn from all the books with something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or home, a day can an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing - no narrative flights, no plot development, no immersive human dramas - to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time. Just his work... and in the end she had the feeling that he done more of that than anyone had any use for.”

LifePurposeLonelinessSolitude
Book:Transit
Create image

“To have both motherhood and work was to have two lives instead of one, was a stunning refinement of historical female experience, and to the people who complained that having it all meant doing it all I would have said, yes, of course it does. You don’t get ‘all’ for nothing. ‘Having it all’, like any form of success, requires hard work. It requires the adoption of the heroic mode of being. But the hero is solitary forever searching out the holy grail, her belief that she is exceptional perhaps only a disguise of the fact that she is essentially alone.”

HeroesHaving It All
Book:Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
Create image

“In the morning I walk across the fields in a bright, arid light. When I return I can hear the grand piano being played through the open windows. I stand in the garden and listen. The lucidity of the sound seems more real to me than anything we have left behind us, than home, than the days whose repetition had laid a kind of fetter over my soul. In its solitariness it speaks to my own single nature. It startles me a little, to be spoken to; as though my life, the life of home, were a fake, and the real life was roaming somewhere in the world, fleet-footed, unique, uncapturable, to be glimpsed sometimes through an open window, and then to vanish again.”

Reality Of LifePower Of MusicRoaming AroundSolitariness
Book:The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy
Create image

“I have never felt myself to be ageing: on the contrary, I have always had the strange sensation as time passes that I am getting not older but younger. My body feels as though it has innocence as its destination. This is not, of course, a physical reality – I view the proof in the mirror with increasing puzzlement – but it is perhaps a psychological one that conscripts the body into its workings. It is as though I was born imprisoned in a block of stone from which it has been both a necessity and an obligation to free myself. The feeling of incarceration in what was pre-existing and inflexible works well enough, I suppose, as a paradigm for the contemporary woman’s struggle towards personal liberty. She might feel it politically, socially, linguistically, emotionally; I happen to have felt it physically. I am not free yet, by any means. It is laborious and slow, chipping away at that block. There would be a temptation to give up, were the feelings of claustrophobia and confinement less intense.”

LibertyFeminismAging
Book:Coventry: Essays
Create image

“He had always worked for his father, in the family firm, but after his father's reaction to the house Pavel had decided not to do that anymore. 'All my life,' he said, 'he criticise. He criticise my work, my idea, he say he don't like the way I talk – even he criticise my wife and my children. But when he criticise my house –' Pavel pursed his lips in a smile – 'then I think, okay, is enough.”

FathersSonsFather Son Relationship
Book:Transit
Create image

“There was, he added, a generalized yearning for the ideal of literature, as for the lost world of childhood, whose authority and reality tended to seem so much greater than that of the present moment. Yet to return to that reality even for a day would for most people be intolerable, as well as impossible: despite our nostalgia for the past and for history, we would quickly find ourselves unable to live there for reasons of discomfort, since the defining motivation of the modern era, he said, whether consciously or not, is the pursuit of freedom from strictness or hardships of any kind.”

RealityLiteratureFreedomFictionChildhoodHardship
Book:Kudos
Create image

“To observe is not to not feel—in fact, it is to put yourself at the mercy of feeling, like the child's warm skin meeting the cold air of midnight. My own children, too, have been roused from the unconsciousness of childhood; theirs too is the pain and the gift of awareness. 'I have two homes,' my daughter said to me one evening, clearly and carefully, 'and I have no home.' To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to be happy without knowing why?”

ChildhoodAwarenessDivorceObservationBrillianceAftermathObserver
Book:Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
Create image

“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. I could never win, and the reason I couldn't seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was powerless – as the woman I was – to overcome.”

Second PlacePg 165
Book:Second Place
Create image

“There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward -- or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exist in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal -- or can be.”

TimePower Of Words
Author:Rachel Cusk
Create image

“Kaikkein vähiten ymmärsin, mitä on vapaus ja miten se saavutetaan. Luulin että riittää kun avaa jotain, irtautuu jostain, vaikka tosiasiassa – kuten hyvin tiedät – vapaus on osinko joka kertyy luomakunnan lakien herpaantumattomasta tottelemisesta ja hallitsemisesta. Konserttipianistin ankarasti koulitut sormet ovat vapaammat kuin musiikinrakastajan orjuutettu sydän voi koskaan olla. Tämä varmaankin selittää, miksi suuret taiteilijat ovat niin usein kammottavia, pettymyksen tuottavia ihmisiä. Elämä suo harvoin kylliksi aikaa ja mahdollisuuksia olla vapaa useammalla kuin yhdellä tavalla.”

TaideVapaus
Book:Second Place
Create image