”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 dramatised his own – as bullies enjoy seeing their own fear in their victims – and partly because it was a sure-fire means for punishing Eloise.”
© 2016 Rachel Cusk, Transit.
Category: English
To desire
”To desire something better required self-control, required an acceptance of the fact that you might not have it for ever and that even if you did you would never feel full to bursting on it. It left you alone with yourself, that desire, […]”
© 2016 Rachel Cusk, Transit.
Another version
”I said I wasn’t sure: when people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. But it didn’t necessarily follow that to stay free was to stay the same. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them. Not changing, in other words, deprived them of what they’d gone to such trouble to attain.”
© 2016 Rachel Cusk, Transit.
Hideouts
“Writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in animal’s fur: the deeper they’re buried the better.”
© 2014 Rachel Cusk, Outline.
Tacit understandings
“His words reminded me of oxygen masks , which had not, of course, put in an appearance over the past few hours. It was kind of a mutual cynicism, I said, that had resulted in the oxygen masks being provided, on the tacit understanding that they would never be needed. My neighbour said he had found that to be true of many aspects of life, but that all the same the law of averages was not something it paid to base your personal expectations on.”
© 2014 Rachel Cusk, Outline.
Sacrifices
“But otherwise this was a story in which I sensed the truth was being sacrificed to the narrator’s desire to win.”
© 2014 Rachel Cusk, Outline.
Impossibly blue
“Withouth noticing I slip into a light yet lingering malaise. Not a depression, more like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue.”
© 2015 Patti Smith, M-Train.
Writer’s Debris
“Occasionally I write directly in my small laptop, sheepishly glancing over to the shelf where my typewriter with its antiquated ribbon sits next to an obsolete Brother word processor. A nagging allegiance prevents me from scrapping either of them. Then there are scores of notebooks, their contents calling – confession, revelation, endless variations of the same paragraph – and piles of napkins scrawled with incomprehensible rants. Dried-out ink bottles, encrusted nibs, cartridges for pens long gone, mechanical pencils emptied of lead. Writer’s debris.”
© 2015 Patti Smith, M-Train.
Writer's Debris 