”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.”
© 2018 Rachel Cusk, Kudos.
”In England, I said, people liked to live in old houses that had been thoroughly refurbished with modern conveniences, and I wondered whether the same principle might be applied to novels; and if so, whether the blunting loss or loss of our own instinct for beauty was responsible for it.”
© 2018 Rachel Cusk, Kudos.
“I noticed that everyone there was around the same age as the married couple, and the absence of anyone older or younger made it seem as though these events were bound neither to the future nor the past, and that no one was entirely certain whether it was freedom or irresponsibility that had untethered them.”
© 2018 Rachel Cusk, Kudos.
”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.
”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.
”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.
” It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destructions. […] Perhaps he said, we are all like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him being lost.”
© 2014 Rachel Cusk, Outline.
“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.
“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.
“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.
Writer's Debris 