Quotes from Helene Cixous

One must have travelled a great deal to discover the obvious. One must have thoroughly rubbed and exhausted one's own eyes to get rid of the thousands of scales we start with...There are poets who have strived to do this...in quest of what I call the second innocence, the one that comes after knowing, the one that no longer knows, the one that knows how not to know.

Writing to touch with letters, with lips, with breath, to caress with the tongue, to lick with the soul, to taste the blood of the beloved body, of life in its remoteness; to saturate the distance with desire; in order to keep it from reading you.

Hold still we're going to do your portrait, so that you can begin looking like it right away.

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...

The author is not only the one who signs but also a completely unknown person blended with (legendary,] mythical, complex, variable consanguinity.

If one proceeds philosophically before proceeding poetically, and this is central to the philosopher, pleasure is crushed, But if one begins by having pleasure, it is like knowing how to swim: one never forgets it [Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans Elizabeth Lowe & Earl Fitz, Foreword by Hélène Cixous trans Verena Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989].

You horrify me. But at the same time, I horrify myself. We are horrible.

Woman must write herself and bring woman into literature

There is hidden and always ready in woman the source; the locus for the other. The mother, too, is a metaphor. It is necessary and sufficient that the best of herself be given to woman by another woman for her to be able to love herself and return in love the body that was "born" to her. Touch me, caress me, you the living no-name, give me my self as myself.

We dislike matter, that is ourselves, because we are destined to matter, because anonymous matter is called death. Perhaps it isn't matter we dislike, perhaps it's anonymity. The anonymity to which we are destined - the loss of name - is what we repress at any price.

Here I am now. And it is hell. Paradise? Yes, I still am here, but who? only myself, with my small waist, my small soul, my small arms, my small intelligence pushed to its greatest heights and thus ruthlessly able to see itself shut up inside its supple transparent but oh ruthlessly inflexible membrane, if I push it any farther it will burst its envelope, I am going to lose part of my mind, we will not longer steer clear of madness.

My soul does everything it can to repair the irreparable.

Let the priests tremble, we're going to show them our sexts!

Men say that there are two unrepresentable things: death and the feminine sex. That's because they need femininity to be associated with death; it's the jitters that gives them a hard-on! for themselves! They need to be afraid of us. Look at the trembling Perseuses moving backward toward us, clad in apotropes. What lovely backs! Not another minute to lose. Let's get out of here.

So I'll take all your books. But the cathedrals I'll leave behind. Their stone is sad and male.

With these high winds I've so hurried that here I am at last in pity's doorway. —Or maybe he was a poor wretch of a human being avid to the point of folly for liberty he wanted the dream to come true: descend from neither father nor mother nor historical memory, be the author of an authorless young man even just for a day, perhaps dream a short week away, let's say some some kind of unlimited eternity—the time of an elevator trip from false to true, ...

Écris, que nul ne ce retienne, que rien ne t'arrête : ni homme, ni imbécile machine capitaliste où les maisons d'édition sont les rusés et obséquieux relais des impératifs d'une économie qui fonctionne contre nous et sur notre dos ; ni toi-même.

But, regardless of gender, the writer must write about "love…love which is our fate, [a] twisted thing, tortuous, delicate, eager, insatiable, the best, and worst thing, the junction point between everything and nothing, the oxymoronic knot of all existence, love which makes cattle meat of us

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. — Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea . (University of Nebraska Press February 1, 1991) Originally published 1983.

What color was his voice? A very beautiful voice. No one can give us the same feeling of beauty and kindness. […] He'd say that he could hear the sun rising.

A true solitude is not unbearable since it allows for otherness.

The new history is coming; it's not a dream, though it do beyond men's imagination, and for good reason. It's going them of their conceptual orthopedics, beginning with the de their enticement machine.

In a relationship to the other, there is everything that is not of the same, of the same that is not, and of the other that he or she is. Generally, one notices all the same that he or she is not. It is much easier. It is harder to see the other he or she is. That is where the real work begins.

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.