263 Quotes by Rachel Cusk

The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite – and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?

He often caught himself living in the mistaken belief that transformation was the same thing as progress. Things could look very different while remain the same: time could seem to have altered everything, without changing the thing that needed to change.

Cruelty is an aspect of civilisation, I say. Cruelty is part of power; it’s like the army; you bring it out when you need to. … What he calls cruelty I call the discipline of self-criticism. A woman who loves herself is unprotected. She will be invaded, put in chains, left there in the primordial swamp to love her heart out. 119-120

Your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to be convince yourself of.

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.

I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn't, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities.

Their father - her ex-husband - had relinquished all responsibility for them when the marriage ended: it almost gave him pleasure, Lawrence believed, to see them suffer, partly because their suffering dramatized his own - as bullies enjoy seeing their own fear in their victims - and partly because it was a sure-fire way of punishing (her)

I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.

We invent these systems with the aim of ensuring fairness, she said, and yet the human situation is so complex that it always evades our attempts to encompass it.