Rachel Cusk Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Rachel Cusk Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Rachel Cusk Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.

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

Rachel Cusk

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

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.

Rachel Cusk

The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion – ‘Everything‘s great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it?’ Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.

Rachel Cusk

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.

Rachel Cusk

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.

Rachel Cusk

Shame is something you’ll find a lot of – particularly Catholic – girls feel about their bodies, about their sexuality, about their diet, about anything you like. Shame is the way you keep them down. That’s the way to crush a girl.

Rachel Cusk

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.

Rachel Cusk

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.

Rachel Cusk

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.

Rachel Cusk

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

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.

Rachel Cusk

The woman who has her being in marriage and motherhood has become part of antithetical reality, revoking property from the woman who remains in a condition of intangible femininity.

Rachel Cusk

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

Rachel Cusk

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.’

Rachel Cusk

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

Rachel Cusk

The British have always made terrible parents.

Rachel Cusk

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

Rachel Cusk

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.

Rachel Cusk

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.

Rachel Cusk

Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people’s minds with emotion.

Rachel Cusk

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

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.

Rachel Cusk

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.

Rachel Cusk

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

Rachel Cusk

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.

Rachel Cusk

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

Rachel Cusk

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.

Rachel Cusk

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

Rachel Cusk

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

Rachel Cusk

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

The anorexic body is held in the grip of will alone; its meaning is far from stable. What it says – ‘Notice me, feed me, mother me’ – is not what it means, for such attentions constitute an agonising test of that will, and also threaten to return the body to the dreaded ‘normality‘ it has been such ecstasy to escape.

Rachel Cusk

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.

Rachel Cusk

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.

Rachel Cusk

What compromises women – babies, domesticity, mediocrity – compromises writing even more.

Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk Quotes

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