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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
Needs
Necessarily
Things
Although
Prove
Existence
Winning
Hope
Fees
Doesn
Encouragement
Anything
Survive

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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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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.
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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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Modern morality is all about perception.
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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.
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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.
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What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
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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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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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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.
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Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.
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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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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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If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
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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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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
Rachel Cusk
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I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
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It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
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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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Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
Rachel Cusk