Quote

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.

Rachel Cusk

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Doesn
Encouragement
Anything
Survive
Needs
Necessarily
Things
Although
Prove
Existence
Winning
Hope
Fees

More quotes by Rachel Cusk

Image
It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.
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
Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.
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
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
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
A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.
Rachel Cusk
Image
Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.
Rachel Cusk
Image
The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.
Rachel Cusk
Image
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
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
Modern morality is all about perception.
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
What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
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
Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
Rachel Cusk
Image
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
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
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
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