Helene Cixous Quotes

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.

Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me.

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.

It is said that life and death are under the power of language.

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

Explore the idea of what the language that women speak would really be like if no one were there to correct them.

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.

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? 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.

I am not innocent. Innocence is a science of the sublime. And I am only at the very beginning of the apprenticeship.

We must learn to speak the language women speak when there is no one there to correct us.

Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort.

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

We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.