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A review by sarahglen
Outline by Rachel Cusk
4.0
A late review for a book I'm was late to the party on. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series.
A few excerpts of note:
— "It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: 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. What was real, in the end, was the loss of the house, which had become the geographical location for things that had gone absent and which represented, I supposed, the hope that they might one day return. To move from the house was to declare, in a way, that we had stopped waiting; we could no longer be found at the usual number, the usual address."
— "What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of."
— "Might what he had seen all those years before be himself? A dark swan, gliding though the protected city, free within its walls; not the American version of freedom, big and flat and borderless as a prairie."
— "I suppose it's a bit like marriage, he said. You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that's never repeated. It's the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground."
— "The material reality of my neighbor, which up there had seemed so light, was concretized down here, and the result was that he seemed more of a stranger, as though context were also a kind of imprisonment."
— "I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living. Without their shared story, the two children began to argue, and where their playing had taken them away from the world, making them unreachable sometimes for hours at a time, their arguments brought them constantly back to it. They had come to me or to their father, seeking intervention and justice; they began to set greater store by facts, by what had been done and said, and to build the case for themselves and against one another."
— "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."
— "All she wishes is for her life to be integrated, to be one thing, rather than an eternal series of oppositions that confound her whichever way she looks."
— "It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream sometimes. Perhaps, he said, 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."
— "The word ellipsis, he'd been told, could literally be translated as 'to hide behind silence.'"
— "I had this feeling 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."
A few excerpts of note:
— "It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: 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. What was real, in the end, was the loss of the house, which had become the geographical location for things that had gone absent and which represented, I supposed, the hope that they might one day return. To move from the house was to declare, in a way, that we had stopped waiting; we could no longer be found at the usual number, the usual address."
— "What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of."
— "Might what he had seen all those years before be himself? A dark swan, gliding though the protected city, free within its walls; not the American version of freedom, big and flat and borderless as a prairie."
— "I suppose it's a bit like marriage, he said. You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that's never repeated. It's the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground."
— "The material reality of my neighbor, which up there had seemed so light, was concretized down here, and the result was that he seemed more of a stranger, as though context were also a kind of imprisonment."
— "I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living. Without their shared story, the two children began to argue, and where their playing had taken them away from the world, making them unreachable sometimes for hours at a time, their arguments brought them constantly back to it. They had come to me or to their father, seeking intervention and justice; they began to set greater store by facts, by what had been done and said, and to build the case for themselves and against one another."
— "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."
— "All she wishes is for her life to be integrated, to be one thing, rather than an eternal series of oppositions that confound her whichever way she looks."
— "It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream sometimes. Perhaps, he said, 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."
— "The word ellipsis, he'd been told, could literally be translated as 'to hide behind silence.'"
— "I had this feeling 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."