263 Quotes by Rachel Cusk

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.

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again.

There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward - or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.

What I lived as feminism were in fact the male values my parents, among others, well-meaningly bequeathed me—the cross-dressing values of my father, and the anti-feminine values of my mother. So I am not a feminist. I am a self-hating transvestite. 15

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.

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.

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?

We are so schooled, he said, in the doctrine of self-acceptance that the idea of refusing to accept yourself becomes quite radical.