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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: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Century
Alone
Hope
Perpetrated
Going
Meantime
Centuries
Manner
Kept
Christianity

More quotes by Rachel Cusk

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Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
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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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I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
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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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I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
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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
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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.
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Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.
Rachel Cusk
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Leaving things behind and starting again is a way of coping with difficulties. I learnt very early in my life that I was able to leave a place and still remain myself.
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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.
Rachel Cusk
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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
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What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
Rachel Cusk
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Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There's always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.
Rachel Cusk
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Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
Rachel Cusk
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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.
Rachel Cusk
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Modern morality is all about perception.
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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It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
Rachel Cusk
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A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.
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