Top 160 Rachel Cusk Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?”

— Rachel Cusk

52. “And of those two ways of living – living in the moment and living outside it – which was more real?”

— Rachel Cusk

53. “It’s a pretty brutal process, having a baby.”

— Rachel Cusk

54. “In marriage you go away from other people, but at the end of marriage they come out to welcome you back. This is civilisation, she says. The worst thing that happened to you has brought out the best in them. 88.”

— Rachel Cusk

55. “The British have always made terrible parents.”

— Rachel Cusk

56. “The one thing you can say about people for sure, is that they’ll only free themselves if freedom is in their own interest.”

— Rachel Cusk

57. “The truth often appears in the guise of a threat to the social code. It has this in common with rudeness. When people tell the truth, they can experience a feeling of release from pretence that is perhaps similar to the release of rudeness. It might follow that people can mistake truth for rudeness, and rudeness for truth. It may only be by examining the aftermath of each that it becomes possible to prove which was which.”

— Rachel Cusk

58. “For many women,’ she said, ‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,’ she said, ’the mother’s sacrifice of herself is absolute, which mine never could have been, and which no woman’s ought to be these days.”

— Rachel Cusk

59. “Some people write simply because they don’t know how to live in the moment and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.”

— Rachel Cusk

60. “What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.”

— Rachel Cusk

61. “There’s a certain point in life at which you realise it’s no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life’s illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be.”

— Rachel Cusk

62. “Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.”

— Rachel Cusk

63. “It was an interesting idea, I said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need – as was generally assumed – to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility.”

— Rachel Cusk

64. “You could spend your whole life’, she said, ’trying to trace events back to your own mistakes.”

— Rachel Cusk

65. “I said that I thought most of us 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

66. “Indeed, we believe everyone has a book in them – a book, not a symphony, and not even a poem. What is it, this book everyone has in them? It is, perhaps, that haunting entity, the ‘true’ self. The true self seeks release, not constraint.”

— Rachel Cusk

67. “All writers, Julian went on, are attention seekers: why else would we be sitting up here on this stage? The fact is, he said, no one took enough notice of us when we were small and now we’re making them pay for it. Any writer who denied the childish element of revenge in what they did was, as far as he was concerned, a liar. Writing was just a way of taking justice into your own hands. If you wanted the proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty.”

— Rachel Cusk

68. “When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.”

— Rachel Cusk

69. “Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn’t sure I would ever discover whether this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for. All I knew was that it carried a kind of honour, if you survived it, and left you in a relationship to the truth that seemed closer, but that in fact might have been identical to the truthfulness of staying in one place.”

— Rachel Cusk

70. “I had been thinking lately about evil, I went on, and was beginning to realize that it was not a product of will but of it’s opposite, of surrender. It represented the relinquishing of effort, the abandonment of self-discipline in the face of desire. It was, in a way, a state of passion.”

— Rachel Cusk

71. “Language is not only the medium through which existence is transacted, it constitutes our central experiences of social and moral content, of such concepts as freedom and truth, and, most importantly, of indivduality and the self; it is also a system of lies, evasions, propaganda, misrepresentation, and conformity.”

— Rachel Cusk

72. “I said that while her story suggested that human lives could be governed by the laws of narrative, and all the notions of retribution and justice that narrative lays claim to, it was in fact merely her interpretation of events that created that illusion.”

— Rachel Cusk

73. “Human beings have a need, generally, to destroy things. The Freudian principle of civilisation is correct. There’s always, always a difference between the family image and the reality.”

— Rachel Cusk

74. “And he was more Irish in America than he’d ever been at home.”

— Rachel Cusk

75. “Money is a country all its own.”

— Rachel Cusk

76. “A neighbor is something that belongs to the stable world of home life, the thing that lives next door to you.”

— Rachel Cusk

77. “He was like a cupboard rammed full with junk: when he opened the door everything fell out; it took time to reorganise himself.”

— Rachel Cusk

78. “Fate, he said, is only truth in its natural state. When you leave things to fate it can take a long time, he said, but its processes are accurate and inexorable.”

— Rachel Cusk

79. “She never said anything unless she had something important to express, which made you realise how much of what people generally said – and he included himself in this statement – was unimportant.”

— Rachel Cusk

80. “What she couldn’t stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily. She herself, she said, was quite willing to use others too, but she only recognised it once they had admitted this intention in themselves.”

— Rachel Cusk

81. “I mean, you never hear someone say they wanted to have an affair but they couldn’t find the time, do you?”

— Rachel Cusk

82. “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

83. “It’s strange,′ he said, ’that you always changed everything and I changed nothing and yet we’ve both ended up in the same place.”

— Rachel Cusk

84. “The prospect is exciting, for it is when the baby sleeps that I liaise, as if it were a lover, with my former life. These liaisons, though always thrilling, are often frantic. I dash about the house unable to decide what to do: to read, to work, to telephone my friends.”

— Rachel Cusk

85. “I said I wasn’t sure: when people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. But it didn’t necessarily follow that to stay free was to stay the same. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them. Not changing, in other words, deprived them of what they’d gone to such trouble to attain.”

— Rachel Cusk

86. “Yet I still, he said, believe in love. Love restores almost everything, and where it can’t restore, it takes away the pain.”

— Rachel Cusk

87. “It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it.”

— Rachel Cusk

88. “The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.”

— Rachel Cusk

89. “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

90. “The sad fact... is that in this era of science and unbelief we have lost the sense of our own significance. We have become cruel, to ourselves and others, because we believe that ultimately we have no value.”

— Rachel Cusk

91. “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

92. “Every time I write a book, I’ve probably taken five years off my life.”

— Rachel Cusk

93. “I probably didn’t share his feelings – he hoped, really, that I didn’t – but he was no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.”

— Rachel Cusk

94. “I realised,’ she said, ’that she was happy for the first time in her life, and I realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.”

— Rachel Cusk

95. “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

96. “I absolutely don’t dislike children – I would choose their company over adult company any time.”

— Rachel Cusk

97. “A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.”

— Rachel Cusk

98. “I have absolutely no concept of work, except for university. But I like to talk to people a lot about their jobs.”

— Rachel Cusk

99. “This feeling, that she was the invisible witness to another person’s solitude – a kind of ghost – nearly drove her mad for awhile.”

— Rachel Cusk

100. “Sometimes, when she has been two or more hours from the source of my body, I begin to feel a sort of elemental anxiety for her, as if she were walking a tightrope and had gone too far out, as if she could not exist for so long in time, in gravity, away from me.”

— Rachel Cusk