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
The most blissful Rachel Cusk quotes that will transform you to a better person
Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in peoples minds with emotion.
People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.
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. That's the way to crush a girl.
That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.
There is a slovenly disrespect for truth and reality that has infected and cross-infected the arts; the values of entertainment are relentlessly in the ascendant, to the extent that it becomes virtually impossible to write a naturalistic fictional sentence without feeling that the fabric of that sentence is already compromised.
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.
If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.
Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one's ability to perceive others.
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.
What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.
The British have always made terrible parents.
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.
A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.
I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.
Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
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.
My children are living, thinking human beings.
It isn't in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.
I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.
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.