23 Quotes & Sayings By Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner is the author of The Flamethrowers, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has been published in Granta and The New Yorker and has appeared in Best American Short Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She lives in New York City with her husband, the artist Paul Chan Read more

1
Who knew why they waited, I thought, understanding that I, too, had it in me to wait. To expect change to come from outside, to concentrate on the task of meeting it, waiting to meet it, rather than going out and finding it. Rachel Kushner
2
I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us. Rachel Kushner
3
There's an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl's dreaming. They aren't real. They aren't the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station, a paperboy trying to lure you into a toolshed, a friend's father trying to lure you into his car. They don't lure. They beckon, but like desert mirages. Rachel Kushner
4
A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them. Rachel Kushner
5
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
6
If your parents died suddenly, Sandro understood, your home was wherever you were, and now you were from nowhere. Your parents were your provenance. Dead, you had no provenance. Rachel Kushner
7
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
8
I thought of the girl in the photo in Ronnie's studio, the one on layaway. She was probably waiting for him this very moment, somewhere downtown. Checking the clock, applying lipstick, concentrating herself into an arrow pointed at Ronnie. Doing the various things women did when they had to wait for something they wanted. Rachel Kushner
9
What happens slowly carries in each part the possibility of returning to what came before. In an accident everything is simultaneous, sudden, irreversible. It means this: no going back. Rachel Kushner
10
A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death. Rachel Kushner
11
Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste. Rachel Kushner
12
I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics. Rachel Kushner
13
Tone is somewhat totalising in that, once I locate it, it tells me what kind of syntax to use, what word choices to make, how much white space to leave on the page, what sentence length, what the rhythmic patterning will be. If I can't find the tone, I sometimes try narrating through the point of view of someone else. Rachel Kushner
14
I usually get up between 7 A.M. and 8 A.M., have coffee, and go right to work. It's really important not to get sidetracked in the morning so I'm still in that dreamy state for my writing. Rachel Kushner
15
I don't believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing exactly that produces a useful sorting mechanism in our society in order to separate children into categories of promising and doomed. The tests seem arbitrary and without real scientific value and yet have lasting consequences. Rachel Kushner
16
The Seventies seemed like this really open time. There were a lot of strong women characters deciding what kind of artists they wanted to be. Rachel Kushner
17
Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on. Rachel Kushner
18
Art is like a stock with a decent return for people in finance, and they get to feel like they are involved with culture, spend time with artists, as part of their dividend. Rachel Kushner
19
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. Rachel Kushner
20
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. Rachel Kushner
21
When one is the type of writer who cares about the meaning of the historically specific setting, the history itself is not something that I would call backdrop. It's not window dressing for a timeless relationship about love and betrayal. For me, the setting and the specific history are active co-agents with me in trying to form the novel. Rachel Kushner
22
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. Rachel Kushner