Quotes from Helene Cixous

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.

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.

I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow.

perhaps within me the desire to put off that which I most in the world desire of late keeps watch, I mean, to write a book but a wounded book, a contentious, broken book, a book not pleased to be a book, to be only a book, to be born in the absence of my friend, a book incapable of acting as if the last times were not upon us, but which at the same time cannot act as if it were only a book hence a being unaware of the end, unaware what time it is.

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?

This is a book of raw flesh.

and this morning I am without fire, my marrow is ash, I am very sad.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

It is essential to exchange the invisible ring for all that we call survival, survive, survivor.

The writer is a secret criminal. How? First because writing tries to undertake the journey toward strange sources of art that are foreign to us. "The thing" does not happen here, it happens somewhere else, in a strange and foreign country. The writer has a foreign origin; we do not know the particular nature of these foreigners, but we feel they feel there is an appeal, that someone is calling them back.

They will never forgive us for this Somewhere Else.

I Drink. I Burn. I Dream. And Sometimes, I tell Stories !

Those I love go in the direction of what they call the last hour—what Clarice Lispector calls, "the hour of the star," "the hour of relinquishing all the lies that have helped us live. Writing or saying the truth is equivalent to death, since we cannot tell the truth. It is forbidden because it hurts everyone. We never say the truth, we must lie, mostly as a result of our two needs: our need for love and cowardice.

There are so many kinds of reality, and so many secret openings in the walls we think are mute.

do everything, I thought, on the contrary, whatever you can to resist the ingenious temptations of compromises, cling to the suffering, stir up the dread, for the monsters are also the benevolent guardians of the survivor's presence within me

Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away – that's how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak – even just open her mouth – in public.

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!

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.

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.