Top 45 Rachel Cusk Quotes

Female hysteria is a subject I’m very fond of. I always try to bring it in somewhere. For me, it is the finest part of the line between comedy and tragedy.

In domestic life, the woman‘s value is inherent, unquantifiable; at home she exchanges proven values for mythological ones. She ‘wants‘ to be at home, and because she is a woman, she’s allowed to want it. This desire is her mystique, it is both what enables her to domesticate herself and what disempowers her.

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.

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.

For years I had lived in my body half-consciously, ignoring it mostly, dismissing its agendas wherever I could, and forever pressing it into the service of mental conceptions that resulted, almost as a by-product, sometimes in its pleasuring and sometimes in its abuse.

In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn’t have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.

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

It seems to me that ‘women’s writing‘ by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.

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.

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

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.

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

The anorexic is out to prove how little she needs, how little she can survive on; she is out, in a sense, to discredit her nurturers, while at the same time making a public crisis out of her need for nurture. Such vulnerability and such power: it brings the whole female machinery to a halt.

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.

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.

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

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

Feminism remains something that needs to be explained to people.

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

The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn’t 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.

The British have always made terrible parents.

A book is not an example of ‘women’s writing’ simply because it is written by a woman. Writing may become ‘women’s writing’ when it could not have been written by a man.

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.

It is expected that a children’s story will raise a difficulty and then resolve it: increasingly, this resolution is so prompt and so resounding that one forgets what exactly the difficulty was.

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.

It’s a pretty brutal process, having a baby.

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.

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.

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

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.

I’m particularly drawn to actors in their own little drama. I find it’s that area I’m very alive to. And I don’t encounter it that often. You have to be far from civilization, you have to be far from New York or London to find people who do that.

I was born abroad, but my parents were both English. Still, those few years of separation, and then coming back to England as an outsider, did give me an ability to see the country in a slightly detached way. I suppose I was made aware of what Englishness actually is because I only became immersed in it later in life.

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

I don’t think I knew that you could be a novelist. I think a lot of my students are in the same condition. I thought it was unreachable, that it was sort of dead people. It took me a long time – I think I was well into novel writing before I really thought, ‘Actually, this is a valid pastime.’

It’s a taboo that comes back over and over, to suggest that women can feel divided – that you can love your child and want to do everything for it, and at the same time want to put it away from you and reclaim something of yourself.

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

There is always shame in the creation of an object for the public gaze.

There’s this really good line in ‘Women in Love’ where Ursula says, ‘I always thought it was a sin to be unhappy.’ And actually I think that’s very common, it’s what a lot of people feel – that you have an obligation to life to be happy if you can.

I sometimes feel that the world is a very uncivilised place where it is meant to be at its most civilised. Where it’s meant to be intellectual or artistic or compassionate, it isn’t, and that makes me very angry.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.