Outline

by Rachel Cusk

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.

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.

If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse.

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?

We should accept occasionally being inconvenienced by our conveniences, he said, just as we had to tolerate flaws in our loved ones: nothing was ever perfect, he said.