Top 160 Rachel Cusk Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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

4. “A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common – the desire to write – could almost be considered meaningless.”

— Rachel Cusk

5. “Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.”

— Rachel Cusk

6. “Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.”

— Rachel Cusk

7. “For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.”

— Rachel Cusk

8. “That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.”

— Rachel Cusk

9. “You have to forget about the boys,′ he said. ‘For a while at least... They’ll devour you... They can’t help it. It’s in their nature. They’ll take it all until there’s nothing left.”

— Rachel Cusk

10. “It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.”

— Rachel Cusk

11. “Having your second child, in case you were wondering, is a lot harder than having your first, except for those people who find it easier. I’m afraid I don’t have the latest figures to confirm this.”

— Rachel Cusk

12. “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 experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.”

— Rachel Cusk

13. “I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.”

— Rachel Cusk

14. “And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own.”

— Rachel Cusk

15. “I’m waiting for the day when my children cease to find my domestic propriety reassuring and actually find it annoying.”

— Rachel Cusk

16. “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

17. “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.”

— Rachel Cusk

18. “I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.”

— Rachel Cusk

19. “Modern morality is all about perception.”

— Rachel Cusk

20. “It was an interesting thought, that stability might be seen as the product of risk; it was perhaps when people tried to keep things the same that the process of decline began.”

— Rachel Cusk

21. “You can’t tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.”

— Rachel Cusk

22. “There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable.”

— Rachel Cusk

23. “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

24. “As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.”

— Rachel Cusk

25. “Music,′ she said, in a languorous and dreamlike manner. ‘Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private.”

— Rachel Cusk

26. “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.”

— Rachel Cusk

27. “But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.”

— Rachel Cusk

28. “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

29. “I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.”

— Rachel Cusk

30. “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

31. “The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite – and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?”

— Rachel Cusk

32. “Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.”

— Rachel Cusk

33. “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

34. “It was perfectly possible to become the prisoner of an artist’s vision, I said. Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again.”

— Rachel Cusk

35. “If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.”

— Rachel Cusk

36. “I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.”

— Rachel Cusk

37. “To become a mother is to learn a whole language – to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born – and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.”

— Rachel Cusk

38. “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

39. “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 identity and no associations.”

— Rachel Cusk

40. “A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it’s the humanitarian principle he’s defending, I suppose.”

— Rachel Cusk

41. “Childhood, after all, is not an ending, but rather a state full of potent curiosity.”

— Rachel Cusk

42. “There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable. I asked her whether she lived in Manchester, and she said no, she had just been up there to teach another course, and had had to fly straight from there to here.”

— Rachel Cusk

43. “People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.”

— Rachel Cusk

44. “There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.”

— Rachel Cusk

45. “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

46. “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

47. “It is hard to listen while you were talking.”

— Rachel Cusk

48. “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 wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is, in reality, good.”

— Rachel Cusk

49. “He began to ask me questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.”

— Rachel Cusk

50. “Writing comes out of tension, tension between what’s inside and what’s outside.”

— Rachel Cusk