Top 90 Rachel Kushner Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.”

— Rachel Kushner

52. “In short, I’m pretty suspicious of the idea that there’s a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones.”

— Rachel Kushner

53. “It was just one night of drinking and chance. I’d known it at the moment I met him, which was surely why I was enchanted in the first place. Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.”

— Rachel Kushner

54. “All the talk of regret. They make you form your life around one thing, the thing you did, and you have to grow yourself from what cannot be undone: they want you to make something from nothing. They make you hate them and yourself. They make it seem that they are the world, and you’ve betrayed it, them, but the world is so much bigger.”

— Rachel Kushner

55. “It was good to be a stranger in Los Angeles. It was bad to be a stranger in Los Angeles with the company of another stranger in a loud shirt.”

— Rachel Kushner

56. “A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death.”

— Rachel Kushner

57. “I didn’t think of the narrative as making a judgment. It didn’t occur to me the reader would either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible there would be that risk.”

— Rachel Kushner

58. “I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.”

— Rachel Kushner

59. “Whatever she was or wasn’t, she looked like a liar and he liked liars.”

— Rachel Kushner

60. “I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.”

— Rachel Kushner

61. “Silent people can be misleading, suggesting profundity and thoughtfulness where there may be none.”

— Rachel Kushner

62. “She was drunk, as everyone was, most of the time.”

— Rachel Kushner

63. “Did you ever notice that women can seem common while men never do? You won’t ever hear anyone describe a man’s appearance as common. The common man means the average man, a typical man, a decent hardworking person of modest dreams and resources. A common woman is a woman who looks cheap. A woman who looks cheap doesn’t have to be respected, and so she has a certain value, a certain cheap value.”

— Rachel Kushner

64. “I should get one of those T-shirts that says ORGASM DONOR,” he said.”

— Rachel Kushner

65. “I guess I’m not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.”

— Rachel Kushner

66. “What I eventually came to understand, about San Francisco, was that I was immersed in beauty and barred from seeing it.”

— Rachel Kushner

67. “People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that’s not the narrative they’re going with.”

— Rachel Kushner

68. “I was not likely to join a cult. That was not the danger I felt in glimpsing the feet of the dead, the bucket from which they drank. It was the proven fact, in the photographed feet, that you could drink death and join it.”

— Rachel Kushner

69. “When the revolution comes it won’t make any difference,” Gloria said. “They’ll have a special guillotine for girls like that. With an even rustier blade for the artists who ogle her.”

— Rachel Kushner

70. “You would not have gone. I understand that. You would not have gone up to his room. You would not have asked him for help. You would not have been wandering lost at midnight at age eleven. You would have been safe and dry and asleep, at home with your mother and father who cared about you and had rules, curfews, expectations. Everything for you would have been different. But if you were me, you would have done what I did. You would have gone, hopeful and stupid, to get the money for the taxi.”

— Rachel Kushner

71. “I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics.”

— Rachel Kushner

72. “Writing is a way of living. It doesn’t quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It’s a way of being alive, for the writer.”

— Rachel Kushner

73. “Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos: believe what you want and don’t look carefully at what isn’t acceptable to you.”

— Rachel Kushner

74. “Another sign, NO TANK TOPS. Under it, typically, an entire three-generation family, all in tank tops, flesh spilling. And what was it about shoulders? What was law enforcement’s fear of shoulders?”

— Rachel Kushner

75. “The thing suppressed as an intrusion,” Eric said, “is almost always worth looking at.”

— Rachel Kushner

76. “Since it’s fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite.”

— Rachel Kushner

77. “I don’t really see art as structured by logic.”

— Rachel Kushner

78. “I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I’m interested in what they say and how they say it.”

— Rachel Kushner

79. “There’s an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl’s dreaming. They aren’t real. They aren’t the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station, a paperboy trying to lure you into a toolshed, a friend’s father trying to lure you into his car. They don’t lure. They beckon, but like desert mirages.”

— Rachel Kushner

80. “One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.”

— Rachel Kushner

81. “Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.”

— Rachel Kushner

82. “Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn’t do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you’re independently wealthy, which I’m not.”

— Rachel Kushner

83. “And if someone did remember them, someone besides me, that person’s account would make them less real, because my memory of them would have to be corrected by facts, which are never considerate of what makes an impression, what stays in the mind after all these years, the very real images that grip me from the erased past and won’t let go.”

— Rachel Kushner

84. “I was in an acute case of the present tense. P.30.”

— Rachel Kushner

85. “Crazy people only lose their cunning last, if they ever lose it.”

— Rachel Kushner

86. “Reality, in a sense, was not an objective place where you were thrust. You had to maintain your hold on it by vigilantly keeping watch over whatever slight and intangible thing gave your life its meaning. Call it a soul, or presence. Whatever it was, a prisoner or guest and you had to trick it or petition it into lingering.”

— Rachel Kushner

87. “God was ejected when we traveled from the closed world to the infinite universe. We were also ejected.”

— Rachel Kushner

88. “Where people are gone the night falls upward, black and unmanned.”

— Rachel Kushner

89. “All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said.”

— Rachel Kushner

90. “I can only know myself, if I can know anyone. I can only judge me.”

— Rachel Kushner