“ I have a romantic conception of the writer's life, and the sort of writer's life that I admire is probably a childless life, possibly a marriageless life, certainly a travelling life - I'm in awe of h… Rachel Cusk
“ I didn't appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole? Rachel Cusk
“ The 'good' mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the 'bad' mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of win… Rachel Cusk
“ Shame is something you'll find a lot of - particularly Catholic - girls feel about their bodies, about their sexuality, about their diet, about anything you like. Shame is the way you keep them down.… Rachel Cusk
“ So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too. Rachel Cusk
“ I can see us there still," he said, "for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attach… Rachel Cusk
“ Among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious. Rachel Cusk
“ 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… Rachel Cusk
“ As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others expe… Rachel Cusk
“ Yet I believe, as I say, that it was precisely this underhand act that gave birth to her vitriol, for people are at their least forgiving when they themselves have been underhand, as though they would… Rachel Cusk
“ To observe is not to not feel—in fact, it is to put yourself at the mercy of feeling, like the child's warm skin meeting the cold air of midnight. My own children, too, have been roused from the uncon… Rachel Cusk
“ Most of didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out. Rachel Cusk
“ I would like”, she resumed, “to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identit… Rachel Cusk
“ Let's just say that drama became something very real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out on the wold. In a s… Rachel Cusk
“ She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she felt herself summed… Rachel Cusk
“ This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with al… Rachel Cusk
“ I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some u… Rachel Cusk
“ 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… Rachel Cusk
“ What she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. In the sense of what… Rachel Cusk
