I had started to desire power, because what I now realized was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.

— Rachel Cusk

I have a romantic conception of the writer's life, and the sort of writer's life that I admire is probably a childless life, possibly a marriageless life, certainly a travelling life - I'm in awe of how much D.H. Lawrence managed to get around. But that's never been something I'm capable of doing.

— Rachel Cusk

I would like”, she resumed, “to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identity and no associations.

— Rachel Cusk

Let's just say that drama became something very real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out on the word. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her. I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself.

— Rachel Cusk

Most of didn’t know how perfect or terrible we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.

— Rachel Cusk

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

— Rachel Cusk

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

— Rachel Cusk

Shame is something you'll find a lot of - particularly Catholic - girls feel about their bodies, about their sexuality, about their diet, about anything you like. Shame is the way you keep them down. That's the way to crush a girl.

— Rachel Cusk

She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she felt herself summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when 'Anne's life' just about covered it.

— Rachel Cusk

She was surprised to discover that Paola was thirty-four. 'What have you been doing all this time?' she wanted to ask, but instead she said, 'What brought you to England?'' There was a man,' Paola said. 'When the man left, I decided to stay.'' An Italian man?' Barely perceptibly, Paola nodded.' He had a job here. He is an -' She paused. '- aeronautical engineer. After a year he had to go home.' Solly was seething with questions. It was strange: in Paola's presence she felt herself to be a failure, yet a part of her believed that a woman of thirty-four with no husband or children was the greatest failure of all. It was a kind of unstoppable need for resolution that grew from her like ivy over the prospect of freedom and tried to strangle it. She couldn't bear the idea of loose threads, of open spaces, of stories without ends. Did Paola not want to get married? Did she not want children, and a house of her own? She sat there in her white sweater, delicately eating. Solely, a sack stuffed with children, a woman who had spent and spent her life until there was none left, sat opposite her, impatient for more.

— Rachel Cusk