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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
Relationship
Rendered
Impossible
Parenthood
Existence
Helpless
Fact
Event
Death
Nearly
Facts
Brings
May
Prepared
Like
Events

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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
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It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
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It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiasticall y they drive you to your own destruction.
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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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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.
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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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Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
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A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.
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It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
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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.
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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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Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
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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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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.
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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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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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What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
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Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.
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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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