Outline
Rachel Cusk
Top 10 Best Quotes
“As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read something I admired, I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.”
“What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.”
“Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.”
“The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite – and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?”
“I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.”
“People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.”
“There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.”
“But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful.”
“I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.”
“I mean, you never hear someone say they wanted to have an affair but they couldn’t find the time, do you?”
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Book Keywords:
power, doubt, returns, definition, everything, love, hope, delusion, freedom, grateful, desire
