Helene Cixous Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Women, Writing, Self

  111 Copy quote

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

  Helene Cixous

  Language, Speak

  46 Copy quote

• 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

  57 Copy quote

• 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

  "The Laugh of the Medusa". Article by Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs, Volume 1, No. 4, pp. 875-893, www.jstor.org. Summer 1976.

  181 Copy quote

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

  Helene Cixous

  Thinking, Effort, Decision

  56 Copy quote

• 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

  52 Copy quote

• 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

  57 Copy quote

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

  Helene Cixous

  Breathing, Preventing

  43 Copy quote

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

  Helene Cixous

  Writing, Dwelling Place, Exit

  45 Copy quote

• 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

  34 Copy quote

• Everything ends with flowers.

  Helene Cixous

  Death, Flower, Dying

  30 Copy quote

• 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, Feminism, Language

  7 Copy quote

• 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, Silence

  42 Copy quote

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

  Helene Cixous

  Lambs, Feels, Greater

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  39 Copy quote

• 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

  41 Copy quote

• 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, Doe, Tongue

  45 Copy quote

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

  Helene Cixous

  Broken Heart, Lost Love, Way

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  28 Copy quote

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

  Helene Cixous

  Life And Death, Language, Said

  9 Copy quote

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

  Helene Cixous

  Fixed

  14 Copy quote

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

  Helene Cixous

  Writing, Mean, Succeed

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  12 Copy quote

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