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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
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Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Good
Waste
Indefatigable
Like
Lies
Orchids
Grows
Assertion
Sure
Toxic
Lying
Underneath
Hope
Nasty
Around
Sign
Something
Lovely
More quotes by Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
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 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
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
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.
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
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.
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
Modern morality is all about perception.
Rachel Cusk
A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.
Rachel Cusk
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
Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
Rachel Cusk
Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.
Rachel Cusk
We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.
Rachel Cusk
I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
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
If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
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