Top 160 Rachel Cusk Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Divorce also entails the beginning of a supposition that that familial reality might have obstructed one’s ability to perceive others.”

— Rachel Cusk

102. “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 all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.”

— Rachel Cusk

103. “All she wishes is for her life to be integrated, to be one thing, rather than an eternal series of oppositions that confound her whichever way she looks.”

— Rachel Cusk

104. “Whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others have treated us.”

— Rachel Cusk

105. “Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.”

— Rachel Cusk

106. “I’m not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don’t understand or sympathise all that much with myself.”

— Rachel Cusk

107. “Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in peoples minds with emotion.”

— Rachel Cusk

108. “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

109. “The rules of writing are mostly indistinguishable from the rules of living, but this tends to be the last place people look when searching for ‘there’.”

— Rachel Cusk

110. “I knew then, she said, that he was a liar, that for all his reportage and his honesty he was determined to keep himself untouched, to take without giving, to hoard himself like a greedy child.”

— Rachel Cusk

111. “He had destroyed the thing she loved most; she, in her turn, had exposed him to failure through expectations he was unable to fulfil. Without meaning to, they had found one another’s deepest vulnerabilities: they had arrived, by this awful shortcut, at the place where for each of them a relationship usually ended, and set out from there.”

— Rachel Cusk

112. “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.”

— Rachel Cusk

113. “All the same, it seemed to him now that that life had been lived almost unconsciously, that he had been lost in it, absorbed in it, as you can be absorbed in a book, believing in its events and living entirely through and with its characters. Never again since had he been able to absorb himself; never again had he been able to believe in that way. Perhaps it was that – the loss of belief – that constituted his yearning for the old life.”

— Rachel Cusk

114. “I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you’ve recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you’re determined won’t suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn’t!”

— Rachel Cusk

115. “It was possible, I had realised, to resist evil but in doing so you acted alone. You stood or fell as an individual. You risked everything in the attempt: it might even be the case, I said, that evil could only be overturned by the absolute sacrifice of self. The problem was that nothing could give greater pleasure to your enemies.”

— Rachel Cusk

116. “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

117. “It is living, not thinking, as a feminist that has become the challenge.”

— Rachel Cusk

118. “At the time, he had got rid of her so efficiently and so suavely that she had felt almost reassured even as she was being left behind.”

— Rachel Cusk

119. “Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.”

— Rachel Cusk

120. “We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.”

— Rachel Cusk

121. “The day lies ahead empty of landmarks, like a prairie, like an untraversable plain.”

— Rachel Cusk

122. “Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.”

— Rachel Cusk

123. “This feeling, of being negated at the same time as I was exposed, had had a particularly powerful effect on me, I said.”

— Rachel Cusk

124. “I am a good and interested mother – which has surprised me.”

— Rachel Cusk

125. “Loneliness, she said, is when nothing will stick to you, when nothing will thrive around you, when you start to think that you kill things just by being there.”

— Rachel Cusk

126. “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 universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.”

— Rachel Cusk

127. “And the blabbing, the telling, was the messiest thing of all: getting control of language was getting control of anger and shame, and it was hard, hard to turn it around, to take the mess of experience and make something coherent out of it. Only then did you know that you’d got the better of the things that had happened to you: when you controlled the story rather than it controlling you.”

— Rachel Cusk

128. “The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of sight.”

— Rachel Cusk

129. “But it is not merely a taboo against complaint that makes the hardship of motherhood inadmissable: like all loves this one has a conflicted core, a grain of torment that buffs the pearl of pleasure; unlike other loves, this conflict has no possibility of resolution.”

— Rachel Cusk

130. “Help is dangerous because it exists outside the human economy: the only payment for help is gratitude.”

— Rachel Cusk

131. “Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I think English rural communities offer quite a lot of material.”

— Rachel Cusk

132. “A visit to the cinema is no longer that: it is less, a tarnished thing, an alloyed pleasure.”

— Rachel Cusk

133. “That tribe was one to which nearly all the men in this country belonged, and it defined itself through a fear of women combined with an utter dependence on them.”

— Rachel Cusk

134. “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 most people mean by living, she said. Without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without those things is a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing – no narrative dramas – to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time.”

— Rachel Cusk

135. “Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves.”

— Rachel Cusk

136. “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

137. “She would begin to view them... with greater objectivity; their need for her started to look like something less discriminating, more parasitical. She felt duped by them into believing herself to be generous, tireless, inspiring, when in fact she was just a self-sacrificing victim. It was this feeling that often brought her to a position of clarity about her own life. She would start to give them less and herself more: by draining her, they created in her a new capacity for selfishness.”

— Rachel Cusk

138. “I don’t really believe in stories, only in the people who tell them.”

— Rachel Cusk

139. “I think a lot of artists no longer want to participate in or be associated with narrative because of its corruptedness in contemporary culture.”

— Rachel Cusk

140. “I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn’t, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities.”

— Rachel Cusk

141. “What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?”

— Rachel Cusk

142. “But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures.”

— Rachel Cusk

143. “I’m a novelist, not a social scientist or a commentator.”

— Rachel Cusk

144. “If a man had a nasty side to his character, she wanted to get to it immediately and confront it. She didn’t want it roaming unseen in the hinterland of the relationship: she wanted to provoke it, to draw it forth, lest it strike her when her back was turned.”

— Rachel Cusk

145. “It may be the case, she said, that it is only when it is too late to escape that we see we were free all along.”

— Rachel Cusk

146. “She had to admit this journalist was one of her trickier customers, and his interviews nearly always ended with the same argument, since he seemed to take such a long time to get round to asking a question and when he did, discovered that he himself had the best answer for it.”

— Rachel Cusk

147. “I had found out more, I said, by listening than I had ever thought possible.”

— Rachel Cusk

148. “If you have always been criticised, from before you can remember, it becomes more or less impossible to locate yourself in the time or space before the criticism was made: to believe, in other words, that you yourself exist.”

— Rachel Cusk

149. “Not to have been born in a woman’s body was a piece of luck in the first place: he couldn’t see his own freedom because he couldn’t conceive of how elementally it might have been denied him... The wounded don’t survive in nature: a woman could never throw herself on fate and expect to come out of it intact. She has to connive at her own survival...”

— Rachel Cusk

150. “My children are living, thinking human beings. It isn’t in my power to regret them, for they belong to themselves.”

— Rachel Cusk