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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: 58
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Existence
Helpless
Fact
Event
Death
Nearly
Facts
Brings
May
Prepared
Like
Events
Relationship
Rendered
Impossible
Parenthood
More quotes by 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 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
A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.
Rachel Cusk
There are certain types of slightly hysterical human characters who, rather than creating, walk around with a sense of their own potential - it's as if they themselves were art objects. They feel as if their lives are written narratives, or pieces of music.
Rachel Cusk
I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
Rachel Cusk
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
I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.
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
It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
Rachel Cusk
Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
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
Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.
Rachel Cusk
Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.
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
It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
Rachel Cusk
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
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
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
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
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
