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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

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Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Everything
Features
Right
Fundamental
Distinctive
Feel
Fundamentals
Defending
Feels
Emotion
Spoil
Important
Probably
Intolerance
Great
Family
Feature
Thing
Tell
Sensitivity
Time
Truth
Whereas

More quotes by Rachel Cusk

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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.
Rachel Cusk
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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.
Rachel Cusk
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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.
Rachel Cusk
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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.
Rachel Cusk
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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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Modern morality is all about perception.
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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I'm a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.
Rachel Cusk
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It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
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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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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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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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
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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.
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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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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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
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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
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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.
Rachel Cusk
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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.
Rachel Cusk