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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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Rachel Cusk
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
True
Release
Fastens
Seems
Musical
Undefined
Self
Novel
Spacious
Made
Wants
Constraint
System
Sonnet
Free
Constraints
Learn
Seeks
Often
Liberation
Notations

More quotes by 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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I don't really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.
Rachel Cusk
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It's a pretty brutal process, having a baby.
Rachel Cusk
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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
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I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.
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
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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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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.
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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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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It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.
Rachel Cusk
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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
Rachel Cusk
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Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
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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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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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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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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A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.
Rachel Cusk
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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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In domestic life the woman's value is inherent, unquantifiable at home she exchanges proven values for mythological ones. She wants to be at home, and because she is a woman she's allowed to want it. This desire is her mystique, it is both what enables her to domesticate herself and what disempowers her.
Rachel Cusk