Quotes from Helene Cixous

We are learning to live with death, with the dead, we are learning with the life of our death in us, to live with cats, with mother, with envelopes, with secrets, to live each instant, we are learning to live, we are learning but we don't know. Envelopes of instants: are they life, are they death? The answer depends on my force of relife. Today I have the Force. Everything is living. Tomorrow we'll see. Today I have the Force of ascent.

I will always be there, I will say to you, the next time. Even after the door. It's neither a gift nor a promise. It's a natural phenomenon. As durable but no more so than a mountain. You can climb on me for millions of years. I am stable, etched by ravines, immobile, torn and flooded by torrential springs.

Behold the portrait of our mortality

We are criminals and we do not know how to express or prove that we are criminals. The problem is that if, as criminals, we were recognized as such, we would have to pay for the crime. Yet if we paid, the crime would disappear and our debt would be wiped out. We must keep our crime in order to keep our crime safe, to avoid the terrible fate of being forgiven.

If the truth about loving or hateful choices were revealed it would break open the earth's crust. Which is why we live in legalized and general delusion. Fiction takes the place of reality. This is why simply naming one of these turns of the unconscious that are part of our strange human adventure engenders such upsets (which are at once intimate, individual, and political); why consciously or unconsciously we constantly try to save ourselves from this naming.

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.

Writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet.

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.

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

This whole book is composed of first pages.

I write, I extend my hand; without my knowing it, this is already a prayer, I extend my hand to you so that you will exist because you do exist, beyond my fingers, your fingers, without my knowing it this is already a response, already I draw to my side the site for you, with one hand I call the other hand, it is in this modest, all-powerful way that I begin to save what is lost. When I write I ask for your hand.

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.

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.

And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it.

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 stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my mouth, I didn't 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!

Women should break out of the snare of silence. They shouldn't be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the harem.

This is why we desire so often to die, when we write, in order to see everything in a flash, and at least once shatter the spine of time with only one pencil stroke. — Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts . (Routledge November 12, 1998)

Que naîtrait-il de mon désir? Le corps unique et inconnu de notre silence: il faut trouver cette langue sans mots et sans limites qui nous perpétuera sans erreur et sans affaiblissement.

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.

I never said to you: come back. Each time that you left forever, I lowered my head and looked at your left hand, I looked at the white carpet in front of the divan on which we were sitting, I didn't say the word, there is no circumstance, then I raised my eyes and looked out the window at the world that was moving away with the solemn slow pace of an ocean liner

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.

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.

This is why I go so willingly into the house of dreams: I admire them for their aptitude for non-discrimination. It is in their house that the equal light from before the guilty feeling reigns. Neither pride, nor shame.

Love loves to return, to bring back to the origin, to begin loving from the first instant, love wants to love everything