Best Rachel Cusk Quotes
- Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority. Attention
- Modern morality is all about perception. All
- We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of. Birth
- What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer? Funny
- 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… Brings
- A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common… Abilities
- 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,… Been
- 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… Derive
- 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… Average
- Having your second child, in case you were wondering, is a lot harder than having your first, except for those people who find it easier.… Afraid
- Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good… Assertion
- 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… Always Always
- 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… Adopt
- 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… Aesthetically
- 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… Actually Live
- 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… Allowed
- Society in the English countryside is still strangely, quaintly divided. If black comedy and a certain type of social commentary are what you want, I… Black
- 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
- The anorexic body is held in the grip of will alone; its meaning is far from stable. What it says - 'Notice me, feed me,… Agonising
- The creativity of childhood was often surrendered amid feelings of unworthiness. So the idea that others are demanding to be given it back - to… Amid
- 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… All
- The reaction to 'Aftermath' has been far worse than to 'A Life's Work,' yet I find I'm perhaps a little less touched by it. In… Aftermath
- 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… Art
- 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… Always Shame
- To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born… Born