Rachel Cusk

Novelist

1967-02-08

Books by Rachel Cusk

Outline
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Arlington Park

A Novel
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Transit
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Quotes by Rachel Cusk

I didn't appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?
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So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.
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Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.
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At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.
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That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.
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People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.
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I can see us there still, he said, for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attached to them, he said, despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to our story of who we were.
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The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.
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I can see us there still, he said, for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attached to them,— he said, —despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to our story of who we were.
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Among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.
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The Cunning Little Vixen, in which a fox is caught by a hunter and kept in a farmyard with the other animals. He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a value for her too in his attention, though its consequence is her captivity. But her nature drives her to seek the wild, and one day she escapes the farmyard and finds her way back into the forest; but instead of feeling liberated she is terrified, for having lived in the farmyard most of her life she has forgotten how to be free.
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She was surprised to discover that Paola was thirty-four. 'What have you been doing all this time?' she wanted to ask, but instead she said, 'What brought you to England?''There was a man,' Paola said. 'When the man left, I decided to stay.''An Italian man?'Barely perceptibly, Paola nodded.'He had a job here. He is an -' She paused. '- aeronautical engineer. After a year he had to go home.'Solly was seething with questions. It was strange: in Paola's presence she felt herself to be a failure, yet a part of her believed that a woman of thirty-four with no husband or children was the greatest failure of all. It was a kind of unstoppable need for resolution that grew from her like ivy over the prospect of freedom and tried to strangle it. She couldn't bear the idea of loose threads, of open spaces, of stories without ends. Did Paola not want to get married? Did she not want children, and a house of her own? She sat there in her white sweater, delicately eating. Solly, a sack stuffed with children, a woman who had spent and spent her life until there was none left, sat opposite her, impatient for more.
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Es dificilísimo que hasta los más bondadosos, los que más te quieren, se tomen tus intereses verdaderamente en serio, porque suelen aconsejarte desde una vida más segura y más aislada que la tuya, en la que escapar no es una realidad, sino algo con lo que de vez en cuando sueñan.
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At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.
Read quote
So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.
Read quote
I can see us there still, he said, for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attached to them, he said, despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to our story of who we were.
Read quote
I didn't appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?
Read quote
People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.
Read quote
The Cunning Little Vixen, in which a fox is caught by a hunter and kept in a farmyard with the other animals. He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a value for her too in his attention, though its consequence is her captivity. But her nature drives her to seek the wild, and one day she escapes the farmyard and finds her way back into the forest; but instead of feeling liberated she is terrified, for having lived in the farmyard most of her life she has forgotten how to be free.
Read quote
Among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.
Read quote