Second Place Quotes

“There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“Some people write simply because they don’t know how to live in the moment and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“He thought I should take pride in what I had survived and what I had achieved, and go around like a sort of queen bee, but meanwhile I had come to view the world as far too dangerous a place in which to stop and congratulate myself. The truth was I had always assumed that pleasure was being held in store for me, like something I was amassing in a bank account, but by the time I came to ask for it I discovered the store was empty. It appeared that it was a perishable entity, and that I should have taken it a little earlier.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“It struck me how the human capacity for receptivity is a kind of birthright, an asset given to us in the moment of our creation by which we are intended to regulate the currency of our souls. Unless we give back to life as much as we take from it, this faculty will fail us sooner or later.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“If you have always been criticised, from before you can remember, it becomes more or less impossible to locate yourself in the time or space before the criticism was made: to believe, in other words, that you yourself exist.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“I saw, in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“Tony has taught me that my habit of wanting to please people by saying that things are better than they are just creates disappointment, mine more than anyone else’s. It’s a form of control, as so much of generosity is.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“There's a certain point in life at which you realise it's no longer interesting that time goes forward - or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life's illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“Not to have been born in a woman's body was a piece of luck in the first place: he couldn't see his own freedom because he couldn't conceive of how elementally it might have been denied him... The wounded don't survive in nature: a woman could never throw herself on fate and expect to come out of it intact. She has to connive at her own survival...”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“The truth was I had always assumed that pleasure was being held in store for me, like something I was amassing in a bank account, but by the time I came to ask for it I discovered the store was empty. It appeared that it was a perishable entity, and that I should have taken it a little earlier.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“You get tired of reality, and then you discover it's already gotten tired of you.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“I’m not the kind of woman who intuitively understands or sympathises with other women, probably because I don’t understand or sympathise all that much with myself.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“I said to him that 'second place' pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life–that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me, by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence. I could never win, and the reason I couldn't seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was powerless – as the woman I was – to overcome.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“Might it be true that half of freedom is the willingness to take it when it's offered?”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“the artist can create outside himself the perfect replica of his own intentions. The rest of us just create a mess, or something hopelessly wooden, no matter how brilliantly we imagined it. That’s”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you’ve recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you’re determined won’t suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn’t!”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“And I went to bed and hugged the memory of his attention until the roof seemed to lift off the hotel and the walls to fall away and the huge starry darkness to embrace me with the implications of what I felt. Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented? Do you understand it, Jeffers? I have wanted to be free my whole life and I haven’t managed to liberate my smallest toe.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place: A Novel

“Cuando dos personas se casan jóvenes, Jeffers, todo nace de la raíz compartida de su juventud y es imposible decir qué parte es de uno y cuál de la otra persona. Por eso, cuando esas dos personas intentan separarse, el corte afecta desde la raíz hasta la punta de las ramas, y el proceso se convierte en una carnicería que parece dejar a la persona reducida a la mitad de lo que era antes. Pero cuando uno se casa más tarde, la relación es más parecida al encuentro de dos cosas distintas ya formadas, a una especie de choque de la una con la otra, parecido a dos masas de tierra que chocan y se fusionan la una con la otra a o largo del tiempo geológico, dejando la dramática costura de las cordilleras como prueba de su fusión.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“...but personally, he could never be anywhere without sooner or later wanting to go somewhere else... Likewise he had never been able to build anything permanent with other human beings.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“I believe there are certain moments in life that don’t obey the laws of time and instead last forever, and this was one of them: I am living it still, Jeffers!”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“I told her she would always be able to find a white man to be obliterated by, if that was what she decided she wanted.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“Some people write simply because they don't know how to live in the moment, I said, and have to reconstruct itand live in it afterwards.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“Eventually I had to get up and go downstairs, and there were all the usual chores to do and all the enacting of oneself that living with other people requires,”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“It’s really far too long,’ he said, in his quiet, unhurried voice. I guessed that Kurt had never once considered length to be a matter of concern in the production of literature–on the contrary, he had probably taken it as a sign that things were going well! ‘It has to be,’ he said, rather stiffly. ‘But it’s over now,’ L said. ‘So why does it? Why does it have to take up time?’ ‘It’s how the story goes,’ Kurt said. He looked rather confused. ‘That was only the first section.’ L lifted his eyebrows and gave a small smile. ‘But my time belongs to me,’ he said. ‘Be careful what you ask people to endure.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“I had learned since then, I said, that I was naive to expect that other people would merely allow me to change when those changes directly interfered with their own interests, and the revelation that my whole life, which appeared to have been built on love and freedom of choice, was in fact a facade that concealed the most craven selfishness was deeply shocking to me. There is no limit, I said, to what certain people will do to you if you offend them or take away what they want, and the fact that at one time you liked or chose to be among those people is one of the central mysteries and tragedies of life. Yet it is only a reflection, I said, of the very conditions and substances out of which your humanity is made – it is the attempt by selfishness and dishonesty to reproduce themselves in you and to continue to flourish in the world. You might as well go mad, I said, as try to resist that attempt.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“She was so smooth and sturdy and unblemished, so new and strong! She stood as a deer stands, proudly with its antlers lifted, and there in the water I quailed before her power and her vulnerability, this creature I had made who seemed to be both of me and outside and beyond me.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“The wounded don’t survive in nature: a woman could never throw herself on fate and expect to come out of it intact.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“My difficulty, I saw then, had always lain in finding a way to give back all the impressions I had received, to render an account to a god who had never come and never come, despite my desire to surrender everything that was stored inside me. Yet even so my receptive faculty had not, for some reason, failed me: I had remained a devourer while yearning to become a creator”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place