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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

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

More quotes by Rachel Cusk

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Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
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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.
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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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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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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 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 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.
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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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It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
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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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Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.
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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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Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.
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Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.
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I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
Rachel Cusk
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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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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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What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
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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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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.
Rachel Cusk