Quote

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

Rachel Cusk

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Principles
Bits
Men
Defending
Like
Humanitarian
Vegetarian
Feminist
Suppose
Principle

More quotes by Rachel Cusk

Image
Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.
Rachel Cusk
Image
The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesnt want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.
Rachel Cusk
Image
I was aware, in those early days of motherhood, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed, taken over by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. Like any cult, it demanded a complete surrender of identity to belong to it.
Rachel Cusk
Image
In domestic life the woman's value is inherent, unquantifiable at home she exchanges proven values for mythological ones. She wants to be at home, and because she is a woman she's allowed to want it. This desire is her mystique, it is both what enables her to domesticate herself and what disempowers her.
Rachel Cusk
Image
Parenthood, like death, is an event for which it is nearly impossible to be prepared. It brings you into a new relationship with the fact of your own existence, a relationship in which one may be rendered helpless.
Rachel Cusk
Image
It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
Rachel Cusk
Image
Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.
Rachel Cusk
Image
The anorexic body is held in the grip of will alone its meaning is far from stable. What it says - 'Notice me, feed me, mother me' - is not what it means, for such attentions constitute an agonising test of that will, and also threaten to return the body to the dreaded 'normality' it has been such ecstasy to escape.
Rachel Cusk
Image
As writers go, I have a skin of average thickness. I am pleased by a good review, disappointed by a bad. None of it penetrates far enough to influence the thing I write next.
Rachel Cusk
Image
The writing you allude to is a form of dissent, but it's also expressive of the need to evolve beyond what is turgid and stale in contemporary fiction.
Rachel Cusk
Image
There are certain types of slightly hysterical human characters who, rather than creating, walk around with a sense of their own potential - it's as if they themselves were art objects. They feel as if their lives are written narratives, or pieces of music.
Rachel Cusk
Image
Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
Rachel Cusk
Image
It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
Rachel Cusk
Image
A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.
Rachel Cusk
Image
What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
Rachel Cusk
Image
I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
Rachel Cusk
Image
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.
Rachel Cusk
Image
We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.
Rachel Cusk
Image
I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.
Rachel Cusk
Image
I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.
Rachel Cusk