Rachel Cusk quotes

Rachel Cusk is a British-Canadian writer and novelist known for her sharply observed explorations of identity, family, and gender. Her acclaimed works include the "Outline" trilogy and several autobiographical books that challenge traditional narrative forms. She has been praised for her innovative style and profound insights into contemporary life. Here are 59 of her quotes:

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 which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.

Rachel Cusk

The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well, she's asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new fake identity, only this time it's her equality that's fake.

Rachel Cusk

There seems to be some problem about my identity. But no one can find it, because it's not there-I have lost all interest in having a self. Being a person has always meant getting blamed for it.

Rachel Cusk

I worry I don't see things the way everyone else does.

Rachel Cusk

Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous...

Rachel Cusk

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' mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is, in reality, good.

Rachel Cusk

Even if they knew the truth of their own feelings, most mothers would be socially and emotionally incapable of revealing it.

Rachel Cusk

How can there be so many mothers in the world but so little sense of what it might be to become one?

Rachel Cusk

To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.

Rachel Cusk

Hope is one of those no-win-no-fee things, and although it needs some encouragement to survive, its existence doesn't necessarily prove anything.

Rachel Cusk

Hope is like one of those orchids that grows around toxic waste: lovely in itself - and an assertion, if you like, of indefatigable good - but a sure sign that something nasty lies underneath.

Rachel Cusk

Christianity has kept itself going for centuries on hope alone, and has perpetrated all manner of naughtiness in the meantime.

Rachel Cusk

The British have always made terrible parents.

Rachel Cusk

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 of your own existence, a relationship in which one may be rendered helpless.

Rachel Cusk

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

Rachel Cusk

What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer?

Rachel Cusk

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.

Rachel Cusk

I remain fascinated by where you go as a woman once you are a mother, and if you ever come back.

Rachel Cusk

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.

Rachel Cusk

The true self seeks release, not constraint. It doesn't want to be corseted in a sonnet or made to learn a system of musical notations. It wants liberation, which is why very often it fastens on the novel, for the novel seems spacious, undefined, free.

Rachel Cusk

A feminist man is a bit like a vegetarian: it's the humanitarian principle he's defending, I suppose.

Rachel Cusk

Modern morality is all about perception.

Rachel Cusk