Quotes from Helene Cixous

And it is characteristic of the devil to be recognized too late.

Losing is all that's left, I say. - Losing is all we've got left to lose, you say The impossibility of not telling, I cannot do otherwise, one can only tell otherwise, with always the same need to make sense of what you've lost, the need not to lose this feeling of losing, the need to feel yourself not losing this feeling that you are still losing the irreplaceable.

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.

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?

Go, fly, swim, bound descend, cross, love the unknown, love the uncertain, love what has not yet been seen, love no one, whom you are, whom you will be, leave yourself, shrug off the old lies, dare what you don't dare, it is there that you will take pleasure . . . and rejoice, in the terror, follow it where you're afraid to go, go ahead, take the plunge, you're on the right trail.

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.

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.

for a week she has been tormented, she burns to write something, gentle warmth emanates from her whole body, but still nothing comes of it. Besides, at the same time she is also busy burning old books, manuals, professional papers, theoretical volumes--because they keep her from doing the one thing that now seems urgent and right to her: shouting her loud hymn of ecstatic pleasure, breaching the tide of the old tongue's hard blare.

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.

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.)

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.

Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds.

Because Jonah's real story is the one never told: never was he as stupendously happy as during those three days and three nights of eternity. He was granted an experience that women dream of: he lived when he was mature in the adored whale's belly. In real paradise. How does one get there? By disobedience. By passion. Running away.)

Power belongs to the smallest and to the dead.

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.

It is easy to love and sing one's love. That is something I am extremely good at doing. Indeed, that is my art. But to be loved, that is true greatness. Being loved, letting oneself be loved, entering the magic and dreadful circle of generosity, receiving gifts, finding the right thank-you's, that is love's real work.

What is this moment called when we suddenly recognize what we have never seen? And which gives us a joy like a wound?

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.

Beauty will no longer be forbidden.

And why don't you write?Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven). Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great - that is, for "great men"; and it's "silly". Besides, you've written a little, but in secret.

Men have committed the greatest crime against women (...) They have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies.

Women's imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.

My book was powerless. The hall was so narrow. I could not run away from you. If I stayed there facing you, it was not out of courage but out of fear, that is the truth - fear of seeing and fear of being seen. But my soul already saw the other truth. Only my soul can tell the story that began in this doorway, slightly to the left of my gaze. There is no other witness. My soul alone saw the struggle.

The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write.