Helene Cixous Quotes

You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies - for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text - as into the world and into history - by her own movement.

By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display - the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.

Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort.

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.

We must learn to speak the language women speak when there is no one there to correct us.

Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me.

She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore language. She lets the other language speak - the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. To life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back; it makes possible.

We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.

And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.

Decisive moment: the one when you will be really alone. And it is perhaps this that makes her hesitate: not the void, but the vastness of the solitude. It's as well if you are frightened of solitude. It's a sign that you have come to the moment of your birth.

Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.

The only book that is worth writing is the one we don’t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed

Everything ends with flowers.

I am not innocent. Innocence is a science of the sublime. And I am only at the very beginning of the apprenticeship.

I do believe in poetry. I believe that there are creatures endowed with the power to put things together and bring them back to life

Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.

Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.

There is no greater love than the love the wolf feels for the lamb-it-doesn’t-eat.

When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.

Me too, I make do, I anoint what cannot be fixed.

Other-Love is writing's first name.

Love is when you suddenly wake up as a cannibal, and not just any old cannibal, or else wake up destined for devourment.

If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through.

Perhaps what I do not manage to operate rapidly enough is the passage between the outside and the inside.

It is said that life and death are under the power of language.

Explore the idea of what the language that women speak would really be like if no one were there to correct them.

Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.

in the synagogue of my heart... I myself jail and the jailed, I go wounded, bite-marked

I am sick of death and worst of all this sickness feeds on itself, the more afraid I am the more I am afraid the more I flee the more I am afraid the more I am haunted.

What happens: events interiors, snatch them from the cradle, from the source. I want to watch watching arrive. I want to watch arrivances. I want to find the root of needing to eat. And taste it: work of sweat / sleep.