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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
Writer
Death
Nearly
Facts
Brings
May
Prepared
Like
Events
Relationship
Rendered
Impossible
Parenthood
Existence
Helpless
Fact
Event
More quotes by 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
It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
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
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.
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
Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
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
Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.
Rachel Cusk
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
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
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
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
If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
Rachel Cusk
Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
Rachel Cusk
It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
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
Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
Rachel Cusk
What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
Rachel Cusk
Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.
Rachel Cusk
