Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Back
Childhood
Ideas
Creativity
Taught
Idea
Unworthiness
Often
Surrendered
Given
Amid
Feelings
Demanding
Others
Disturbing

More quotes by Rachel Cusk

Image
I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
Rachel Cusk
Image
A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.
Rachel Cusk
Image
Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
Rachel Cusk
Image
The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it? Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.
Rachel Cusk
Image
Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
Rachel Cusk
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
Rachel Cusk
Image
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
Image
Modern morality is all about perception.
Rachel Cusk
Image
If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
Rachel Cusk
Image
The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In both cases, I've coped artistically by believing the criticisms weren't right. They upset me, but they didn't challenge my understanding of how to write, nor of how morality functions in literature.
Rachel Cusk
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.
Rachel Cusk
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.
Rachel Cusk
Image
My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.
Rachel Cusk