Rachel Kushner Quotes

“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.”

“It can be very hard to accept how disappointing life is, Harper, because that's what it is, and you have to accept it. With faith and time and hard work you reach a point where ... where the disappointment doesn't hurt as much, and then it gets easy to live with. Quite easy. Which ... is in its own way a disappointment.”

“You can't live in the world without an idea of the world, but it's living that makes the ideas. You can't wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory.”

“The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change? In Time? And we all desire that Change will come.”

“I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it's like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I'm losing.”

“My dad had a Vincent Black Shadow, which was a quite particular thing: it was the fastest cycle of its era... It sparked a world for me; when I was old enough, I got a motorcycle.”

“I feel there's a power in theatre, but it's an indirect power. It's like the relationship of the sleeper to the unconscious. You discover things you can't afford to countenance in waking life. You can forget them, remember them a day later or not have any idea what they are about.”

“Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.”

“These women were taking over these former manufacturing warehouses in SoHo and figuring out a way to be fashionable and viable without money. It's hard to imagine a life like that in Manhattan now - there's something romantic about it.”

“The only things that are really permanent are love, family, friendship, and that is a lesson. At the end of the day, that's really what it boils down to. The rest of it is just stuff.”