Top 160 Rachel Cusk Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 4

151. “I imagine the corruption of myself running through her tracts, into her veins and recesses. I long to withdraw my sting from her innocent body.”

— Rachel Cusk

152. “It struck me how the human capacity for receptivity is a kind of birthright, an asset given to us in the moment of our creation by which we are intended to regulate the currency of our souls. Unless we give back to life as much as we take from it, this faculty will fail us sooner or later.”

— Rachel Cusk

153. “The families are on display – it’s part of how they function. Families tend to be conscious of being looked at: they perform themselves as though in expectation of a response, a judgement. I suppose they are exposing what they have created, as an artist feels compelled to do.”

— Rachel Cusk

154. “I am sure there must be a word for it in German, something compound like lifegrief that would translate as outpouring of sorrow at the human condition, for I do not entirely believe that it is a digestive malaise.”

— Rachel Cusk

155. “If you were a woman you would certainly find your mother’s life hanging over your head like a sword and you would be asking yourself what progress you had made, other than to double for yourself the work she had been expected to do and receive three times the blame for it.”

— Rachel Cusk

156. “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

157. “And saying you love him is the same as saying you don’t want to know what he really thinks of you. If you talked to him,’ she said, ’you would find out.”

— Rachel Cusk

158. “You get tired of reality, and then you discover it’s already gotten tired of you.”

— Rachel Cusk

159. “In fact, he went on, you could see the whole history of capitalism as a history of combustion, not just the burning of substances that have lain in the earth for millions of years but also of knowledge, ideas, culture and indeed beauty – anything, in other words, that has taken time to develop and accrue.”

— Rachel Cusk

160. “Might it be true that half of freedom is the willingness to take it when it’s offered?”

— Rachel Cusk

161. “He has not asked them one question about themselves: she and Claudia do not exist for him, they are just lines of perspective, ways for him to measure his location in space.”

— Rachel Cusk

162. “I saw, in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state.”

— Rachel Cusk

163. “Like God, my father expressed himself through absence: it was easier, perhaps, to be grateful to someone who wasn’t there.”

— Rachel Cusk

164. “Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?”

— Rachel Cusk

165. “As Sophocles said it – how dreadful knowledge of the truth is, when the truth can’t help you!”

— Rachel Cusk

166. “It was her own capacity for story telling that made her see her own hand in what happened around her.”

— Rachel Cusk

167. “One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying – it seemed to me – was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction that they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become – to put it bluntly – anathema to me.”

— Rachel Cusk

168. “They thought her strange, she knew. They would not blame the difficult world. Everyone else dealt with it. Why couldn’t she?”

— Rachel Cusk

169. “I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world – whatever its features – was catastrophic.”

— Rachel Cusk

170. “But I quickly came to see, she said, that in fact there was nothing worse than to be an average white male of average talents and intelligence: even the most oppressed housewife, she said, is closer to the drama and poetry of life than he is, because as Louise Bourgeois shows us she is capable at least of holding more than one perspective.”

— Rachel Cusk

171. “It was as if some breeze kept wafting toward me, bearing a tormenting scent of freedom- and that same torment suddenly seemed to have bothered and pursued me for too much of my life.”

— Rachel Cusk

172. “You know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘You earn just enough to get by but at the end of the day there’s nothing left mentally, and so you cling to the job even harder.”

— Rachel Cusk

173. “The truth was I had always assumed that pleasure was being held in store for me, like something I was amassing in a bank account, but by the time I came to ask for it I discovered the store was empty. It appeared that it was a perishable entity, and that I should have taken it a little earlier.”

— Rachel Cusk

174. “Tony has taught me that my habit of wanting to please people by saying that things are better than they are just creates disappointment, mine more than anyone else’s. It’s a form of control, as so much of generosity is.”

— Rachel Cusk

175. “That quality, I said, could almost be called suspense, and it seemed to me to be generated by the belief that our lives were governed by mystery, when in fact that mystery was merely the extent of our self-deception over the fact of our own mortality.”

— Rachel Cusk

176. “I believe there are certain moments in life that don’t obey the laws of time and instead last forever, and this was one of them: I am living it still, Jeffers!”

— Rachel Cusk

177. “Change is also loss.”

— Rachel Cusk

178. “Even the social life she’d envied had started to pall on her, the shallowness of it, the same competitive faces in the same rooms, the repetitiveness and lack of growth, the lack of tenderness or intimacy.”

— Rachel Cusk

179. “History goes over the top like a steamroller, she said, crushing everything in its path, whereas childhood kills the roots. And that is the poison, she said, that seeps into the soil.”

— Rachel Cusk