Quote

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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Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Says
Feed
Anorexic
Alone
Notice
Dreaded
Attention
Escape
Normality
Means
Test
Constitute
Mother
Held
Grip
Also
Tests
Threaten
Body
Meaning
Ecstasy
Attentions
Mean
Return
Stable
Anorexics

More quotes by 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.
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It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
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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.
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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.
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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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We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.
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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.
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I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
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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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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
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If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
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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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Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
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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.
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Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.
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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.
Rachel Cusk
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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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Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.
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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