Outline Quotes

“the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women and that you are always trying to purge with what you call frankness. As soon as you cease to be frank, you see a stain, you are forced to acknowledge imperfection, and you want only to run away and hide in shame.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“But I do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also – as you say, by the same logic – something I will feel driven to provoke.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“And saying you love him is the same as saying you don’t want to know what he really thinks of you. If you talked to him,’ she said, ‘you would find out.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“mutual frankness that she could work out who she herself was and what she actually wanted.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“She herself, she said, had visited the very depths of disillusionment in the male character by being honest in precisely this way: men who had claimed one minute to be dying of love for her were openly insulting her the next,”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“you had said those things to him, you understand, you would have heard some truths in return. If you had been frank you would have elicited frankness.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“This feeling, of being negated at the same time as I was exposed, had had a particularly powerful effect on me, I said.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“replied that I wasn’t sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a ‘real’ self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“The Cunning Little Vixen, in which a fox is caught by a hunter and kept in a farmyard with the other animals. He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a value for her too in his attention, though its consequence is her captivity. But her nature drives her to seek the wild, and one day she escapes the farmyard and finds her way back into the forest; but instead of feeling liberated she is terrified, for having lived in the farmyard most of her life she has forgotten how to be free.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“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 wold. 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, Outline

“At times, Melete continued, it had seemed to her that this fact was what had created this behavior. Her sense of reality, in other words, had created something outside itself that mocked and hated her. But as I say, she said, those thoughts belong to the world of religious sensibility, which has become in our times the language of neurosis.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“Yet I believe, as I say, that it was precisely this underhand act that gave birth to her vitriol, for people are at their least forgiving when they themselves have been underhand, as though they would exact their innocence from you at any price.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“It's true,' Elena said, 'that my own need for provocation is something other people seem to find very difficult to understand. Yet to me it has always made perfect sense. But I do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also - as you say, by the same logic - something I will feel driven to provoke. If the relationship is going to end, in other words, I want to know it and confront it as soon as possible. Sometimes,' she said, 'this process is so quick that the relationship is over almost as soon as it has begun. Very often I have felt that my relationships have had no story, and the reason is because I have jumped ahead of myself, the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter. I want to know everything straight away. I want to know the content without living through the time span.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“What she couldn't stand, she said, was pretence of any kind, especially the pretence of desire, wherein someone feigned the need to possess her wholly when in fact what he wanted was to use her temporarily.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“It had been, in other words, our family home, and I had stayed to watch it become the grave of something I could no longer definitively call either a reality or an illusion.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn’t buy your way into it.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“El dinero es un país en si mismo”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“I said his image reminded me of writing, except a play was more of a house than a city; and I remembered how strong it had once made me feel, to build that house and then walk away from it, and look behind me to see it still there.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“For most of the people she knew, people in their forties, this was a time of softening and expanding, of expectations growing blurred, of running a little to seed or to fat after the exhaustion of the chase: she saw them beginning to relax and make themselves comfortable in their lives. But for her, coming back out into the world again, the lines were still sharp, the expectations undimmed: sometimes she felt as if she’d arrived at a party just as everyone else was leaving, leaving to go home together and sleep.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“When I think back to the time before, and especially to the years of my marriage, it seems to me as though my wife and I looked at the world through a long lens of preconception, by which we held ourselves at some unbreachable distance from what was around us, a distance that constituted a kind of safety but also created a space for illusion. We never, I think, discovered the true nature of the things we saw, any more than we were ever in danger of being affected by them; we peered at them, at people and places, like people on a ship peer at the passing mainland, and should we have seen them in any kind of trouble, or they us, there would have been nothing whatever either one of us could have done about it.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“That is a terrible notion that only a Catholic could have come up with, he said.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“I had this feeling,’ she continued, ‘which I have had since and which gets worse each time we argue, that we were caught in a net of words, tangled up in all these strings and knots, and that each of us thought there was something we could say that would set us free, but the more words we spoke the more tangles and knots there were. I find myself thinking of the simplicity of the time before we had said one syllable to one another: that is the time I would like to go back to,’ she said, ‘the time just before we first opened our mouths to speak.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“I can see us there still,’ he said, ‘for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“They did not take any of these things personally. That was the difference between them and me, and at that time it was all the difference in the world.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“You learn very quickly, he said, that your children are exempt only from your own judgement.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“There was a certain self-consciousness in the set of his shoulders: this was, then, a performance, a piece of showing off. He didn’t once glance back at me, for people are at their least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“I said that I didn’t believe people could change so completely, could evolve an unrecognisable morality; it was merely that that part of themselves had lain dormant, waiting to be evoked by circumstance. I said that I thought most of us didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

“You could spend your whole life', she said, 'trying to trace events back to your own mistakes. People in legend thought that their misfortunes could be traced back to their failure to offer libations to certain gods. But there is another explanation,' she said, 'which is simply that he is mad.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline