Rachel Cusk Quotes

People tell you everything changes when you have a kid, but what nobody says is you don't mind.

People only talk about what a joyous experience it is, but there is terror: Your life, as you know it, is over. It's over the day that child is born. It's over, and something completely new starts.

Like every parent, when you start your family, your life completely changes. And you completely live for someone else. I find that the most extraordinary thing. Your life is handed over to someone else. From that moment on, they come first in every choice you make. It's the most wonderful thing.

I expected it to be overwhelming and all-encompassing, but having a kid brings you into the world in a whole different way.

My priorities had been changing before I had Addie but after she was born they changed completely. I don't count - my daughter sort of owns me.

We owe our existence to our parents, but we actually didn't have a choice.

I see that children fill the existential hollowness many people feel; that when we have children, we know they will need us, and maybe love us, but we don't have a clue how hard it is going to be.

Before my son was born, I use to tell people that I was looking forward to no longer being the star of my own movie; then Harry came along, and it was like, 'Whoa, I'm really not!'

People had always vaguely mentioned that when you have children, how part of your life would stop. But they don't say that some other extraordinary part of your life opens up.

I don't want to sound corny; everyone tells you what it's going to be like to have kids and you're like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.' And then you have kids, and in an instant nothing in the world matters except for this stranger, because this person comes into the world and in an instant all your focus and priorities becomes these kids.

Becoming a mother was the single defining event of my life. It felt like the whole world shifted.

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

Being a parent is not for the faint of heart. I may joke about knowing fear, but the fact is, the first time I ever knew real fear was the day Charlotte, my first child, was born. Suddenly there is someone in the world you care about more than anything.

Some people think that your life changes for the worse when you become a father, but on the contrary, when my daughter was born, she brought light and joy into my life.

My mother's death was the defining moment of my life.

I hold one thing dearer than all else: my commitment to my son.

Babies were dangerous . . . they made you fall in love before you knew what was happening.

A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn't care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you.

It is amazing how a new child can refocus one's direction seconds after its birth. Everything falls into a feeling of 'rightness'.

It's the most terrifying day of your life, the day the first one is born. Your life, as you know it, is gone. Never to return. But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk, and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you'll ever meet in your life.

No man can possibly know what life means, what the world means, until he has a child and loves it. And then the whole universe changes and nothing will ever again seem exactly as it seemed before.

What saved me then? Nothing but pregnancy. And each time after I had given birth to my work my life hung suspended by a thin thread.

So dear I love him, that with him, all deaths I could endure, without him, live no life.

When we choose to be parents, we accept another human being as part of ourselves, and a large part of our emotional selves will stay with that person as long as we live. From that time on, there will be another person on this earth whose orbit around us will affect us as surely as the moon affects the tides, and affect us in some ways more deeply than anyone else can. Our children are extensions of ourselves.

Life. Consider the alternative.