Rachel Cusk quotes

I was aware, in those early days of motherhood, that my behaviour was strange to the people who knew me well. It was as though I had been brainwashed, taken over by a cult religion. And yet this cult, motherhood, was not a place where I could actually live. Like any cult, it demanded a complete surrender of identity to belong to it. (Rachel Cusk)
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.
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
There seems to be some problem about my identity. But no one can find it, because it's not there-I have lost all interest in having a self. Being a person has always meant getting blamed for it.
Rachel Cusk
I worry I don't see things the way everyone else does.
Rachel Cusk
Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous...
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.
Rachel Cusk
How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?
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
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)
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
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
Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.
Rachel Cusk
The British have always made terrible parents.
Rachel Cusk
Parenthood, like death, is an event for which it is nearly impossible to be prepared. It brings you into a new relationship with the fact of your own existence, a relationship in which one may be rendered helpless.
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
What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?
Rachel Cusk
Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.
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
There is always shame in the creation of an expressive work, whether it's a book or a clay pot. Every artist worries about how they will be seen by others through their work. When you create, you aspire to do justice to yourself, to remake yourself, and there is always the fear that you will expose the very thing that you hoped to transform. (Rachel Cusk)
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.
Rachel Cusk
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.
Rachel Cusk
A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.
Rachel Cusk
Modern morality is all about perception.
Rachel Cusk