Writing comes out of tension, tension between what's inside and what's outside.

Rachel Cusk, Outline

Rachel Cusk, from Outline

November so far

Through the windows a strange subterranean light was rising, barely distinguishable from darkness. I felt change far beneath me, moving deep beneath the surface of things, like the plates of the earth blindly moving in their black traces.

—Rachel Cusk, Transit

“I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see.” ― Rachel Cusk, Outline

Painting: "Reverie" by Charles-Amable Lenoir

rachel cusk, outline.

From Outline by Rachel Cusk

She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation.

Rachel Cusk, Arlington Park

Whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others have treated us.

Rachel Cusk, Transit

Rachel Cusk, from Outline

[Text ID: There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that 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.]

My current read + books from two (three?) months ago I have yet to read (oops)

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.

Rachel Cusk, Outline

The harrowing beauty and brevity of these books and their apparent simplicity disguised somewhat the punishing cost of their honesty. Never had I seen the supposed freedom — the “narcissism,” as we now like to call it — of self-examination so exposed in its brutality. Ernaux grasped the depths of isolation and loss she would need to descend to in order to retrieve the original reality of her being. Her art bears no relation to a privileging of personal experience; on the contrary, it is almost a self-violation.

—Rachel Cusk on the work or Annie Ernaux

"I have not, in fact, become more loving, more generous , more capacious. I have merely become more afraid of love's limits, and more certain that they exist."

A Life's Work, by Rachel Cusk