Outline

by Rachel Cusk

among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.

But the only hope of finding anything is to stay exactly where you are, at the agreed place. It’s just a question of how long you can hold out.

your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.

And he was more Irish in America than he’d ever been at home.

And how can you even know you have taken something for granted until it is no longer there?

That is always a dangerous moment, he said, to make a big decision, when you are not sure of what you deserve.

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 becoming lost.

I discovered that a life with no story was not, in the end, a life that I could live.

‘Men like to play this game. And they actually fear your honesty, because then the game is spoiled. By not being honest with a man you allow him to continue his game, to live in his fantasy.’

The people I meet don’t even seem to have characters. And life seems so rich, when I look at it through his eyes, yet my own life very often appears sterile, like a bad patch of earth, as if nothing will grow there however hard I try.

The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew: it was an interesting thought.

There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable.