Rachel Kushner > Quotes

“People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who passed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that identity, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“A blend of good and bad characterized all humans, and to pretend to sort that out was an insult to human complexity. But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was OK to be murky to yourself, to know you weren't an angel, but other people had to be more cleanly divided into good and bad.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“You have time. Meaning don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“The answer is not coming. I have to find an arbitrary point inside the spell of waiting, the open absence, and tear myself away. Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it’s worthy of respect. It’s not admirable to want love, it just is.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Did you ever notice that women can seem common while men never do? You won’t ever hear anyone describe a man’s appearance as common. The common man means the average man, a typical man, a decent hardworking person of modest dreams and resources. A common woman is a woman who looks cheap. A woman who looks cheap doesn’t have to be respected, and so she has a certain value, a certain cheap value.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don’t exist, and then your plans are meaningless.”
― Rachel Kushner , The Mars Room

“(Later, Giddle's response when I told her I was in love: "Oh God, I'm so sorry. Love is awful. It ruins every normal thing, everything but itself. It makes you crazy and for nothing, because it's so disappointing. But good luck with that.")”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Things are more complicated than some can admit. People are stupider and less demonic than some can admit.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“To be young was to be more closely rooted to the thing that forms you,”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“No Tank Tops, the sign had said at Youth Guidance. Because it was presumed the parents didn’t know better than to show up to court looking like hell. The sign might have said Your Poverty Reeks.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“But I had seen, the night I met her, that her beauty was going to leave her like it does all women. For the face, time relays some essential message, and time is the message. It takes things away. But its passage, its damages, are all we have. Without it, there's nothing.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“It was just one night of drinking and chance. I'd known it at the moment I met him, which was surely why I was enchanted in the first place. Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren't going to get it.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“She smiled at him like they were about to rob a bank together.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“You would not have gone. I understand that. You would not have gone up to his room. You would not have asked him for help. You would not have been wandering lost at midnight at age eleven. You would have been safe and dry and asleep, at home with your mother and father who cared about you and had rules, curfews, expectations. Everything for you would have been different. But if you were me, you would have done what I did. You would have gone, hopeful and stupid, to get the money for the taxi.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“And here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to assume your dream is in any way shared, that it’s a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to assume that other people don’t find you and your dream utterly revolting.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“stood at the window at four a.m. and told myself: You, too, have a core of precious salt. The human core of inner salt, like this salt of Cardona, comes from the deepest part. Human salt, like this salt, is everlasting. Mine it, use it, and it will not deplete. In my own salt, my own core, this is what I knew: Life goes on a while. Then it ends. There is no fairness. Bad people are honored, and good ones are punished. The reverse is also true. Good people are honored, and bad people are punished, and some will call this grace, or the hand of God, instead of luck. But deep down, even if they lack the courage to admit it, inside each person, they know that the world is lawless and chaotic and random. This truth is stored in their salt. Some have access. Others don’t. A gift or a curse, that my salt is right here, with me all the time? A gift. I’d rather be driven by immutable truths than the winds of some opinion, whose real function is to underscore a person’s social position in a group, a belief without depth. These boys in the library would profess to share beliefs.”
― Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake

“Documenting life as it happened seemed like a way of not experiencing it. As if posing for photographs, or focusing on what to save and call a souvenir, made the present instantly the past. You had to choose one or the other was Everly’s feeling. Try to shape a moment into a memory you could save and look at later, or have the moment as it was happening, but you couldn’t have both.”
― Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba

“All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Crazy people only lose their cunning last, if they ever lose it.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“We should torture language to tell the truth.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“What I eventually came to understand, about San Francisco, was that I was immersed in beauty and barred from seeing it.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“What occurred did so because I was open to it, and not because fate and I met at a certain angle. I had plenty of time to think about this later. I thought about it so much that the events of that evening sometimes ran along under my mood like a secret river, in the way that all buried truths rushed along quietly in some hidden place.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

“Isn’t that what intimacy so often is? Supposing you understand, conveying that you do, because you feel in theory that you could understand, and you want to, and yet secretly you don’t?”
― Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers