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

Rachel Cusk

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Rachel Cusk
Age: 58
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Manner
Kept
Christianity
Century
Alone
Hope
Perpetrated
Going
Meantime
Centuries

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It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
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I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
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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.
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The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that ­others are demanding to be given it back - to be taught - is disturbing.
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A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.
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I don't go to church any more, but I think that Catholicism is rather like the brand they use on cattle: I feel so formed in that Catholic mould that I don't think I could adopt any other form of spirituality. I still get feelings of consolation about churches.
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A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.
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Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.
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You could time a suburban story by your watch: it lasts as long as it takes a small furry animal that's lonely to find friends, or a small furry animal that's lost to find its parents it lasts as long as a quick avowal of love it lasts precisely as long as the average parent is disposed on a Tuesday night to spend reading aloud to children.
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Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
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We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.
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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.
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My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.
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If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
Rachel Cusk
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The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature.
Rachel Cusk
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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
Rachel Cusk
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Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.
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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.
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An eating disorder epidemic suggests that love and disgust are being jointly marketed, as it were that wherever the proposition might first have come from, the unacceptability of the female body has been disseminated culturally.
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I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.
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