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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
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Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
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Events
Relationship
Rendered
Impossible
Parenthood
Existence
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May
Prepared
More quotes by Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
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
Modern morality is all about perception.
Rachel Cusk
Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
Rachel Cusk
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
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.
Rachel Cusk
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
Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
Rachel Cusk
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
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.
Rachel Cusk
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
I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.
Rachel Cusk
Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
Rachel Cusk
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
The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it? Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.
Rachel Cusk
A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.
Rachel Cusk
Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
Rachel Cusk
Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.
Rachel Cusk
My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.
Rachel Cusk
Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.
Rachel Cusk
