Top 84 Helene Cixous Quotes
#1. The more I anoint the more my mind adheres physically to the mysterious fabric of love.
I am decutie. Worn thin. You know that word?
Helene Cixous
#2. And I? I drink, I burn, I gather dreams.
And sometimes I tell a story. Because Promethea asks me for a bowl of words before she goes to sleep.
Helene Cixous
#3. To fly/steal is woman's gesture, to steal into language to make it fly.
Helene Cixous
#4. I did not even know this existed ... this world, I did not know. I thought it existed only in one's head, and in dreams ... And now: here I am.
Helene Cixous
#5. An old cardboard box: you think it but you don't say it.
Leftovers, that are swept up and glued together.
I am your alipte, I say, I am your personal trainer and masseuse. I oil you.
But there's no ointment against the bad thoughts and phantasms.
Helene Cixous
#6. Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.
Helene Cixous
#7. A true solitude is not unbearable since it allows for otherness.
Helene Cixous
#8. They will never forgive us for this Somewhere Else.
Helene Cixous
#9. I am not innocent. Innocence is a science of the sublime. And I am only at the very beginning of the apprenticeship.
Helene Cixous
#10. So little by little I climb towards life, in the straitjacket of my prison. I don't waste an ounce of air or sun. I explore I bring to light.
Helene Cixous
#11. It beings with fear, passion begins with a fear. Fear is the trembling of faith. One cannot have faith without being afraid. One cannot have faith, no human being. Being human is that: to have faith that's been fractured then stuck back together.
Helene Cixous
#12. If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through.
Helene Cixous
#13. Perhaps what I do not manage to operate rapidly enough is the passage between the outside and the inside.
Helene Cixous
#14. One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One's own night. Walking through the self toward dark.
Helene Cixous
#15. Sometimes I wait for you at the exact edge of the jetty where we left each other. Sometimes I disappear into an unconscious hole and lie there silted up in stories having nothing to do with the vigorous immediacy of our epic.
Helene Cixous
#16. And this morning I am without fire, my marrow is ash, I am very sad.
Helene Cixous
#17. The most beautiful things cannot be written, unfortunately. Fortunately. We would have to be able to write with our eyes, with wild eyes, with the tears of our eyes, with the frenzy of a gaze, with the skin of our hands.
Helene Cixous
#18. Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.
Helene Cixous
#19. I would touch its walls with my fingers and its ceilings with my looks, I would invoke the powers of writing, I would bathe my soul in the rivers of unknown thoughts that genius unrolls when surrounded by the song of all the books its heart receives the marvelous measures of its own speech ...
Helene Cixous
#20. There are so many kinds of reality, and so many secret openings in the walls we think are mute.
Helene Cixous
#21. The refugees leave a refuge, enter a refuge run to the windows, what they see makes them move on, they move, refuge means move, move moves on into madness, my book I say is on the move, we are moving each other
Helene Cixous
#22. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.
Helene Cixous
#23. Power belongs to the smallest and to the dead.
Helene Cixous
#24. When you went away, you left me nothing but the sun-bleached world. You did not even leave me a heart to bleed with. I found I was standing there with no body, and so no voice for calling you.
Helene Cixous
#26.
All that because Promethea is a woman? All this uproar, this trembling, this resistance?
Yes. No. Y-Yes ... Naynayno. Whynoyes.
Yes, Promethea is a woman.
Yes, but "because is a woman," that is not important.
But no it precisely its not being important that is so important.
Helene Cixous
#28. The author of what I describe is not myself, it is the Other. First of all it is you, it is the woman, it is the queen, it is the Child, it is a person who is greater than I and who surpasses you as well, whom you do not know. I am your scribe.
Helene Cixous
#29. It is said that life and death are under the power of language.
Helene Cixous
#30. In the synagogue of my heart ...
I myself jail and the jailed, I go wounded, bite-marked
Helene Cixous
#31. 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
#33. -I am being killed by what keeps me from dying.
And next the sea became very small no bigger than a bathtub. Rolling in pain crashed over and over again onto the edges of the world. Then a divinity fished her out.
Helene Cixous
#34. Me too, I make do, I anoint what cannot be fixed.
Helene Cixous
#35. 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.
Helene Cixous
#36. I, too, overflow; ... my body knows unheard-of songs.
Helene Cixous
#37. We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.
Helene Cixous
#38. And I want to become a woman I can love. I want to meet women who love themselves, who are alive, who are not debased, overshadowed, wiped out.
Helene Cixous
#39. Everything she wanted to tell her, was unable to tell her, because she was afraid of hearing her own voice come out of her heart and be covered with blood, and then she poured all the blood into these syllables, and she offered it to her to drink like this : You have it.
Helene Cixous
#40. 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
#41. Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me.
Helene Cixous
#42. I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only an
oblique consideration will be found here of man; it's up to him to say
where his masculinity and femininity are at: this will concern us once
men have opened their eyes and seen themselves clearly.
Helene Cixous
#43. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort.
Helene Cixous
#44. 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
#45. People do not see you, / They invent you and accuse you.
Helene Cixous
#46. We've been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty; we've been victims of the old fool's game: each one will love the other sex. I'll give you your body and you'll give me mine.
Helene Cixous
#47. This is what writing is: I one language, I another language, and between the two, the line that makes them vibrate; writing forms a passageway between two shores.
Helene Cixous
#48. 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
#49. We are going toward the sea. I have swollen. I am carried away. Sometimes at night love comes up so quickly and so high, and if we have no little boat perhaps it is because we want to roll breathless under the ocean floor.
Helene Cixous
#50. In front of us there is an immense garden of words and non-words, a serre, that is, a greenhouse in which are preserved by my care so many things of speech you have given me while leaving me free to cultivate them.
Helene Cixous
#51. 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?
Helene Cixous
#52. We must learn to speak the language women speak when there is no one there to correct us.
Helene Cixous
#53. Those who are locked up know better than their jailers the taste of free air.
Helene Cixous
#54. 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
#55. I Drink. I Burn. I Dream.
And Sometimes, I tell Stories !
Helene Cixous
#56. This book is my obliging you. This is a book I never would have dared write, if I did not feel protected and obligated by your madness.
Helene Cixous
#57. Explore the idea of what the language that women speak would really be like if no one were there to correct them ...
Helene Cixous
#58. This is how I want you: larger and smaller stronger and weaker taller and trembling more, more out of breath that I more burning more penetrating bolder bossier more yielding more frightened narrower and more relentless than you are more than I.
Helene Cixous
#59. Voice-cry. Agony
the spoken "word" exploded, blown to bits by suffering and anger, demolishing discourse: this is how she has always been heard before, ever since the time when masculine society began to push her offstage, expulsing her, plundering her. Ever since Medea, ever since Electra.
Helene Cixous
#60. The author is not only the one who signs but also a completely unknown person blended with (legendary,] mythical, complex, variable consanguinity.
Helene Cixous
#61. I ... overflow; my desires have invented new desire, my body knows unheard-of-songs. Time and again ... I 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 stinking fortune.
Helene Cixous
#62. Hold still we're going to do your portrait, so that you can begin looking like it right away.
Helene Cixous
#63. 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.
Helene Cixous
#65. 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
#66. It makes me cry, I want to talk about something I am not sure I can talk about, I want to talk about the inside from the inside, I do not want to leave it
I am so happy in the silky damp dark of the labyrinth and there is no thread
Helene Cixous
#68. 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
#69. When I write, all those that we don't know we can be write themselves from me, without exclusion, without prediction, and everything that we will be calls us to the tireless, intoxicating, tender-costly-search for love. We will never lack ourselves.
Helene Cixous
#70. But I may also be afraid.
I am afraid.
I have already read it. And, not to lie to you, I liked it. But I am afraid. I am not afraid of you, Fidelia, Sania, Ania. I am afraid of you.
(I put all this in my separate notebook. My doubtbook.)
Helene Cixous
#71. These days I am in a super-acute, a hyped-up life. It never goes to sleep.
And yet all the events of this hyped-up life seem to be cut from the hyperdream. All of them turn up accompanied by a voice that murmurs to my heart "it's not going to last.
Helene Cixous
#72. We then spend our lives not seeing what we saw. The picture is there: what we know when we're small; when we are small, we know everything in a childlike way.
Helene Cixous
#73. In woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history. As a militant, she is an integral part of all liberations.
Helene Cixous
#74. There is no greater love than the love the wolf feels for the lamb-it-doesn't-eat.
Helene Cixous
#76. I would like so much to be the freest of free women: so free that I would even be liberated from the painful sensation of being liberated. I would like to be so freely free that I would never even think to say to myself: "How free I am!
Helene Cixous
#77. I ask of writing what I ask of desire: that it have no relation to the logic which puts desire on the side of possession, of acquisition, or even of that consumption-consummation which, when pushed to its limits with such exultation, links (false) consciousness with death
Helene Cixous
#78. 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
#79. A heartbreaking paradox: if only I can finish my work so that it will live. Yet if it is finished, completed, a part of me but departed from me, I lost it alive, living but separate; and if it does not leave me, it is incomplete, insufficient, and half-dead that I keep it.
Helene Cixous
#80. 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
#81. It is essential to exchange the invisible ring for all that we call survival, survive, survivor.
Helene Cixous
#82. Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
Helene Cixous
#83. But I am just a woman who thinks her duty is not to forget. And this duty, which I believe I must fulfill, is: "as a woman" living now I must repeat again and again "I am a woman," because we exist in an epoch still so ancient and ignorant and slow that there is still always the danger of gynocide.
Helene Cixous
#84. My voice repels death; my death; your death; my voice is my other. I write and you are not dead. The other is safe if I write.
Helene Cixous
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