Rachel Cusk Quotes

That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.

Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative.

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?

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.

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.

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

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.