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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
Like
Lies
Orchids
Grows
Assertion
Sure
Toxic
Lying
Underneath
Hope
Nasty
Around
Sign
Something
Lovely
Good
Waste
Indefatigable

More quotes by Rachel Cusk

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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.
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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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My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.
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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 don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
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Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.
Rachel Cusk
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Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.
Rachel Cusk
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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
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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
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What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
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Modern morality is all about perception.
Rachel Cusk
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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
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Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
Rachel Cusk
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Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
Rachel Cusk
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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.
Rachel Cusk
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It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
Rachel Cusk
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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.
Rachel Cusk
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Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
Rachel Cusk
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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
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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