Rachel Cusk Kudos Quotes

A degree of self-deception, she said, was an essential part of the talent for living.

The one thing you can say about people for sure, is that they'll only free themselves if freedom is in their own interest.

You can't tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.

She never said anything unless she had something important to express, which made you realise how much of what people generally said – and he included himself in this statement – was unimportant.

Podría ser que solo cuando ya es demasiado tarde para escapar nos demos cuenta de que siempre hemos sido libres.

If you were a woman you would certainly find your mother’s life hanging over your head like a sword and you would be asking yourself what progress you had made, other than to double for yourself the work she had been expected to do and receive three times the blame for it.

I realised,’ she said, ‘that she was happy for the first time in her life, and I realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.

It was an interesting idea, I said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need – as was generally assumed – to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility.

That quality, I said, could almost be called suspense, and it seemed to me to be generated by the belief that our lives were governed by mystery, when in fact that mystery was merely the extent of our self-deception over the fact of our own mortality.

That tribe was one to which nearly all the men in this country belonged, and it defined itself through a fear of women combined with an utter dependence on them.

because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards

Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn’t sure I would ever discover whether this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for. All I knew was that it carried a kind of honour, if you survived it, and left you in a relationship to the truth that seemed closer, but that in fact might have been identical to the truthfulness of staying in one place.

He had many friends – smart, aspirational people of good taste – who had planted a jacaranda tree in their new garden as though this law of nature somehow didn’t apply to them and they could make it grow by the force of their will. After a year or two they would become frustrated and complain that it had barely increased even an inch. But it would take twenty, thirty, forty years for one of these trees to grow and yield its beautiful display, he said smiling: when you tell them this fact they are horrified, perhaps because they can’t imagine remaining in the same house or indeed the same marriage for so long, and they almost come to hate their jacaranda tree, he said, sometimes even digging it up and replacing it with something else, because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards. It is almost a tragedy, he said, that the same people who are capable of wanting the jacaranda tree and understanding its beauty are incapable of nurturing one themselves.

She had to admit this journalist was one of her trickier customers, and his interviews nearly always ended with the same argument, since he seemed to take such a long time to get round to asking a question and when he did, discovered that he himself had the best answer for it.

But I quickly came to see, she said, that in fact there was nothing worse than to be an average white male of average talents and intelligence: even the most oppressed housewife, she said, is closer to the drama and poetry of life than he is, because as Louise Bourgeois shows us she is capable at least of holding more than one perspective.

a saddening thought, she said, that when a group of women get together, far from advancing the cause of femininity, they end up pathologising it.

It was her own capacity for story telling that made her see her own hand in what happened around her.

It may be the case, she said, that it is only when it is too late to escape that we see we were free all along.

The one thing you can say about people for sure,’ Ryan said, ‘is that they’ll only free themselves if freedom is in their own interest.

You know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘You earn just enough to get by but at the end of the day there’s nothing left mentally, and so you cling to the job even harder.

History goes over the top like a steamroller, she said, crushing everything in its path, whereas childhood kills the roots. And that is the poison, she said, that seeps into the soil.

Minden kiadó azt keresi, folytatta, mondhatnánk, ez a modern irodalom világának Szent Grálja, hogy kik azok az írók, akiknek a művei megállják a helyüket a piacon, mégsem veszítik el a kapcsolatot az irodalmi értékekkel; más szóval, akik olyan könyveket írnak, amelyeket az olvasók élvezetesnek találnak, de nem kell szégyenkezniük, ha rajtakapják őket az olvasásukon.

Tudomása szerint egy problémát nem lehet megldani egyszerűen azzal, hogy újra meg újra megfogalmazzák a végtelenségig, hacsak nem bízunk abban, hogy maga a végtelenség megsemmisít bizonyos tényezőket.

...he observed that in the current situation the possibility of destruction seemed genuinely to be upon us, to the extent that he couldn't see what move on the chess board would get us out of this corner.

I said that while her story suggested that human lives could be governed by the laws of narrative, and all the notions of retribution and justice that narrative lays claim to, it was in fact merely her interpretation of events that created that illusion.

You asked me earlier,' she said to me, 'whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don't have the answer to that,' she said, 'but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner.

Tüm yazarlar ilgi meraklısıdır. Aslında biz çocukken kimse bizi yeterince önemsememiş, biz de şimdi onlara bunun bedelini ödetiyoruz. Yaptığı işlerdeki çocuksu intikam unsurunu reddeden yazar ona göre yalancıydı. Yazı yazmak yalnızca adaleti kendi ellerinize almanın bir yoluydu.

In fact, he went on, you could see the whole history of capitalism as a history of combustion, not just the burning of substances that have lain in the earth for millions of years but also of knowledge, ideas, culture and indeed beauty – anything, in other words, that has taken time to develop and accrue.

I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world---whatever its features---was catastrophic.

I made sure to work hard, she said, and to achieve the highest results, but no matter how hard I worked there was always a boy there, level with me, who appeared to be less out of breath and to be taking things in his stride; and so I cultivated the art, she said, of nonchalance, and gave every impression of being less well-prepared than I was, until one day I found that this impression had become a reality, and that I achieved even more by leaving a few things to chance and by taking a leap of faith, such as the child takes when the training wheels come off the bicycle and it finds itself cycling unsupported for the first time.

He was all for people speaking their minds but it did make him miss the time when what was beneath the surface had been permitted to stay there.

I guess it reminded me of having a kid,’ she said finally. ‘You survive your own death,’ she added, ‘and then there’s nothing left to do except talk about it.

She turned her head, still smiling, and looked down the hill towards the city, where cars were moving in swarms along the roads beside the river. The distinctive shape of her nose, which from the front slightly marred her fine-featured face, in profile attained beauty: it was upturned and snub-ended and had a deep V in its bridge, as though someone had drawn it with a certain licence, to make a point about the relationship between destiny and form.

but I suspect he feels that if he gave his attention to a book and lost himself in it, he might never be found again, and the world he is trying to hold on to might spin out of his control.

If you were unfamiliar with the political situation in our country, you might think you were witnessing not the machinations of a democracy but the final surrender of personal consciousness into the public domain.

He had grown more animated while he spoke, and his desperate, wild-eyed demeanour had softened into the genial mask of the raconteur. I had the impression that these were stories he had told before and liked to tell, as though he had discovered the power and pleasure of reliving events with their sting removed. The skill, I saw, lay in skirting close enough to what appeared to be the truth without allowing what you actually felt about it to regain its power over you.

I had the impression that these were stories he had told before and liked to tell, as though he had discovered the power and pleasure of reliving events with their sting removed. The skill, I saw, lay in skirting close enough to what appeared to be the truth without allowing what you actually felt about it to regain its power over you.

there was no reason, he said, to trouble myself on that account, since research had proved that parental influence over personality outcomes was virtually nil. A parent’s effect lay almost entirely in the quality of his or her nurture and of the home environment, much as a plant will wilt or thrive according to where it is placed and how it is cared for, while its organic structure remains inviolable.

I hadn’t realised, I said, how much of navigation is the belief in progress, and the assumption of fixity in what you have left behind.

They didn’t love or hate anything, or at least so that you could see; it was just that they were in the habit of never showing their hand.

At home she generally avoided doing housework, she went on, because those kinds of chores made her feel so unimportant that she wouldn’t have been able to write anything afterwards. She supposed they made her feel like an ordinary woman, when most of the time she didn’t think about being a woman, or perhaps didn’t even believe she was one, because at home it wasn’t a subject that came up.

What kind of love was this, that needed the love object domesticated and locked up? And if there was love being handed out, why wasn’t she getting any?

Tus fracasos nunca dejan de regresar a tu lado, mientras que tus éxitos son algo de lo que siempre tendrás que convencerte.

La personalidad debía adaptarse a las nuevas circunstancias lingüísticas para crearse de nuevo

Talán az a helyzet, hogy csak amikor menekülni már késő, akkor jövünk rá, hogy mindvégig szabadok voltunk...

you survived your own death and there was nothing left to do but to talk about it, to strangers on a plane or whoever would listen

He had, he said, attended every single event at the conference, even those conducted in languages he didn’t understand: he felt the organisers would have been disappointed in him otherwise.

although I’ve noticed that the people who love children the most often respect them the least.

El éxito te aleja de las cosas que conoces, por lo visto, mientras que el fracaso te condena a ellas.

Supongo, añadí, que esa es una definición del amor, creer en algo que solo dos personas pueden ver.

his mother had explained this anomaly to him by saying that the biological basis of parenthood was essentially antithetical to reason, and as such could be seen as a whole system of inverted logic.

As far as he knew a problem couldn’t be solved simply by infinitely restating it, unless you relied on infinity itself to break certain factors down.

People could want an infinite number of things, but what did we really need? Far less than we thought we did – with the right knowledge, that engine could run so cleanly and economically it barely left a trace of itself. For the seeker after advantage, this was priceless information: it represented a whole different sphere of control, in which one could become virtually invisible and therefore invulnerable. To ask oneself the question of what one wanted, on the other hand, was to bog oneself down in the mire, where any and everyone could see you.

Suffering had always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn’t sure I would ever discover whether this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for.

I realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.

You asked me earlier,’ she said to me, ‘whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don’t have the answer to that,’ she said, ‘but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner.

Perhaps it follows, he said, that people who live in the sun don't take responsibility for their own happiness.

There were often terrible arguments,’ she said, ‘between my sister and my parents, and I profited from them simply by not being the cause of them, so that when it came to these interviews I found I was in a familiar position. I seemed to profit,’ she said, ‘from the mere fact of not being these public women, while they were in a sense fighting my cause, just as my sister had fought my cause by demanding certain freedoms that I was then easily granted when I reached the same age.

I am one of those who believes that without suffering there can be no art,

It was human nature, his mother said, for people to wish cruelty on one another simply because they had been shown cruelty themselves: the repetition of behavioural forms was the curious panacea with which most people sought to relieve the suffering caused by precisely those same forms.

He had come to the conclusion that most questions were nothing more than an attempt to ascertain conformity, like rudimentary maths problems. Two and two did indeed usually equal four: it was when you gave a different answer, he had discovered, that people got upset.

It was dark by now, and electric light rained down in crossing lance-shapes through the glass ceiling from the buildings outside while the black body of the river undulated just beyond the windows, with the human figures inside interposed in reflection on its churning surfaces.

might even be their forgotten suffering at the hands of literary texts that had left behind this residue of respect for books; if, that is, psychoanalysts are to be believed when they say we are unconsciously drawn to the repetition of painful experiences.

But why should they rescue you?’ he said. ‘There you are, sitting in a castle in the beautiful Italian countryside, with your own room and nobody bothering you and complete freedom to do your work. For most people that is a fantasy!’ ‘I don’t know,’ Linda said dully. ‘I guess it must mean there’s something wrong with me.

I said it was true that the question of whether to leave or remain was one we usually asked ourselves in private, to the extent that it could almost be said to constitute the innermost core of self-determination.

realised too that she would never have known this happiness had she not gone through the unhappiness that preceded it, in precisely the way that she did.

so for most people the act of reading symbolised intelligence, quite possibly because in that formative time they had not enjoyed or understood the books that they were obliged to read.

Now and again,’ she continued presently, ‘I have met people who have freed themselves from their family relationships. Yet there often seems to be a kind of emptiness in that freedom, as though in order to dispense with their relatives they have had to dispense with a part of themselves. Like the man trapped in the glacier who cut off his own arm,’ she said, with a faint smile.

More than anything,’ he said, ‘people dislike being made to feel stupid, and if you arouse those feelings, you do so at your own cost.

...he felt the destruction had by now been earned in full by humanity...

Around her throat and wrist she wore several pieces of jewelry and her face was carefully made up, especially around the eyes, which she had outlined dramatically so that they appeared continually startled, as though they were observing things whose intensity and extremity only she could see. After a while I could recognize behind this disguise the timid woman I remembered, and I understood her outfit to be something designed to prevent her from being forgotten or ignored, yet it also had the effect of making her femininity seem a kind of question other people were required to answer or a problem they were expected to solve.

Through the windows you could hear the sounds of footsteps on the cobbles below and the hiss and whir of bicycles passing in their shoals and drifts; and most of all you could hear the bells that rang unendingly from the town’s many churches, striking not just the hours, but the quarter and half hours, so that each segment of time became a seed of silence that then blossomed, filling the air with what almost seemed a kind of self-description.

...his whole life, as far as she could see, consisted of writerly sinecures and engagements, like a whole life of eating only desserts. She wasn't sure it was healthy.

There was, he added, a generalized yearning for the ideal of literature, as for the lost world of childhood, whose authority and reality tended to seem so much greater than that of the present moment. Yet to return to that reality even for a day would for most people be intolerable, as well as impossible: despite our nostalgia for the past and for history, we would quickly find ourselves unable to live there for reasons of discomfort, since the defining motivation of the modern era, he said, whether consciously or not, is the pursuit of freedom from strictness or hardships of any kind.

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.

We live with an almost superstitious belief in our own differences, she said, and Luis has shown that those differences are not the result of some divine mystery but are merely the consequence of our lack of empathy, which if we had it would enable us to see that in fact we are all the same.

What is history other than memory without pain?’ he said, smiling pleasantly and folding his small white hands together on the table in front of him. ‘If people want to recapture some of those hardships, these days they go to the gym.

because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards. It is almost a tragedy, he said, that the same people who are capable of wanting the jacaranda tree and understanding its beauty are incapable of nurturing one themselves.

This feeling was perhaps what had once driven his people to roam the world, seeking the home that would cure them of it. It may be the case that to find that home is to end one’s quest, I said, but it is with the feeling of displacement itself that the true intimacy develops and that constitutes, as it were, the story.

We live with an almost superstitious belief in our own differences, she said, and Luís has shown that those differences are not the result of some divine mystery but are merely the consequence of our lack of empathy, which if we had it would enable us to see that in fact we are all the same.

He had got into this habit, which more or less dispensed with the necessity for remembering anything, not because he tended to be forgetful but because his capacity for holding on to information, however useless or trivial, would otherwise have kept him in a state of constant distraction.