Quotes by Hélène Cixous

About Hélène Cixous:

Hélène Cixous is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician. She holds honorary degrees from Queen's University and the University of Alberta in Canada; University College Dublin in Ireland; the University of York and University College London in the UK; and Georgetown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA. In 2008 she was appointed as A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University until June 2014.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.

Hélène Cixous

Everything she wanted to tell her, was unable to tell her, because she was afraid of hearing her own voice come out of her heart and be covered with blood, and then she poured all the blood into these syllables, and she offered it to her to drink lik...

Hélène Cixous

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 . (I put all this in my separate notebook. My doubtbook.)

Hélène Cixous

You make me thirsty, Promethea, my river, you make me eternally thirsty, my water. As if I had spent my life in an old house of dried mud, so dry myself that I could not even thirst, until yesterday. And suddenly yesterday, the dusty floor of my old ...

Hélène Cixous

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

Hélène Cixous

But I am just a woman who thinks her duty is not to forget. And this duty, which I believe I must fulfill, is: "as a woman" living now I must repeat again and again "I am a woman," because we exist in an epoch still so ancient and ignorant and slow t...

Hélène Cixous

--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 impor...

Hélène Cixous

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

Hélène Cixous

We are going toward the sea. I have swollen. I am carried away. Sometimes at night love comes up so quickly and so high, and if we have no little boat perhaps it is because we want to roll breathless under the ocean floor.

Hélène Cixous

This is what’s happening: together we are descending the stairs of the heart, which lead to the sources. (It is a secret staircase. I knew it existed. Which is why I avoided it. Because it leads to the other-life, deep, underground, the fluvial, th...

Hélène Cixous

And I? I drink, I burn, I gather dreams. And sometimes I tell a story. Because Promethea asks me for a bowl of words before she goes to sleep.

Hélène Cixous

All I know: I could only encounter you, my oasis, coming out of a desert. Deserted myself. This is all right. My futureless and solitary self. When suddenly I hear the voice of the springs--Right away you made me want to sing. To cry. Then to drink. ...

Hélène Cixous

You can go on losing after loss.

Hélène Cixous

- 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 los...

Hélène Cixous

Almost every day I can feel myself suffering mainly in the head, I can explain the pain to myself but knowing it comes from an inflammation of my imagination doesn't prevent it being reality itself. What's more I'd be crazy not to go crazy. We don't ...

Hélène Cixous

Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs.

Hélène Cixous

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 re...

Hélène Cixous

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 ne...

Hélène Cixous

Reading is not as insignificant as we claim. First we must steal the key to the library. Reading is a provocation, a rebellion: we open the book’s door, pretending it is a simple paperback cover, and in broad daylight escape! We are no longer there...

Hélène Cixous

We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it’s very healthy, because it’s the only place where we never lie. At night we don’t lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they...

Hélène Cixous

Author Bio

  • NameHélène Cixous
  • DescriptionFrench philosopher and writer
  • BornJune 5, 1937
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionPoet; Essayist; Playwright; Philosopher; Writer
  • AwardsCommander Of The National Order Of Merit; ;