Quotes by Hélène Cixous

We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it’s very healthy, because it’s the only place where we never lie. At night we don’t lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life.

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

When I write, its everything that we dont 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.

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

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

To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly.

And why dont you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you havent written. (And why I didnt write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, its reserved for the great-that is for great men; and its silly.Besides, youve written a little, but in secret. And it wasnt good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didnt go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.

People do not see you, / They invent you and accuse you.

Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs.

Almost every day I can feel myself suffering mainly in the head, I can explain the pain to myself but knowing it comes from an inflammation of my imagination doesnt prevent it being reality itself. Whats more Id be crazy not to go crazy. We dont know what an illness is. On awful hurts we plaster little old words, as if we could think hell with a paper bandage.

Wouldnt the worst be, isnt the worst, in truth, that women arent 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 shes not deadly. Shes beautiful and shes laughing.

I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst-burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didnt open my mouth, I didnt repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! Whats the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient infinite woman who...hasnt been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ...divine composure), hasnt accused herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasnt thought that she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness is that she resists death, that she makes trouble.

Wouldnt the worst be, isnt the worst, in truth, that women arent castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning?

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.

I see nothing. I do not move. It is an empty time, animal time, vigilant, I am submerged, under the earth and under time. I listen. Perhaps the waiting is a form of prayer.

Hold still were going to do your portrait, so that you can begin looking like it right away.

And, why dont you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you, your body is yours, take it. I know why you havent written. (And why I didnt write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, its reserved for the great -that is, for great men; and its silly. Besides, youve written a little, but in secret. And it wasnt good, because, you punished yourself for writing, because you didnt go all the way; or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty -so as to be forgiven; or to forgot, to bury it until next time.

They grab you by the breasts, they pluck your derriere, they stuff you in a pot, they saute you with sperm, they grab you by the beak, they stick you in a house, they fatten you up on conjugal oil, they shut you up in your cage. And now, lay.

The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny thatthe effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen themby repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalentof destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipationis imperative.

I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only anoblique consideration will be found here of man; it’s up to him to saywhere his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us oncemen have opened their eyes and seen themselves clearly.