Helene Cixous famous quotes

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.
-- Helene Cixous

#Writing #Self #Law

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.
-- Helene Cixous

#Solitude #Vastness #Void

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.
-- Helene Cixous

#Writing #Exclusion #Searching For Love

Other-Love is writing's first name.
-- Helene Cixous

#Writing #Love Is #Names

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

#Enough #Passages #Manage

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

#Writing #Dwelling #Exit

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

#Life And Death #Language #Said

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

#Sublime #Innocence #Innocent

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
-- Helene Cixous

#Hurt #Book #Writing

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.
-- Helene Cixous

#Sick #Sickness #Worst

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

#Inspiration #Writing #Body

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

#Writing #Mean #Succeed

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.
-- Helene Cixous

#Wish #Tongue #Doe

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

#Thinking #Effort #Decision

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.
-- Helene Cixous

#Beautiful #Laughing #Medusa

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

#Breathing

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

#Writing #Meditation #Needs

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

#Language #Speak

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

#Ideas #Language #Speak

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
-- Helene Cixous

#Believe #Together #I Believe

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.
-- Helene Cixous

#Spring #Writing #Self

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.
-- Helene Cixous

#Writing #Cutting #Class

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

#Mean #Desire

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

#Fixed

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

#Heart #Jail #Synagogue

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

#Lambs #Feels

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

#Love Is #Wake Up #Cannibal

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.
-- Helene Cixous

#Writing #Wings #Bird

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

#Broken Heart #Way #Losing

Everything ends with flowers.
-- Helene Cixous

#Death #Flower #Dying

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.
-- Helene Cixous

#Sleep #Roots #Sweat

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.
-- Helene Cixous

#Beautiful #Men #Laughing