QuoteProject
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.
Helene Cixous
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote reflects on the transformative power of solitude and its role in personal growth.

Helene Cixous suggests that the 'decisive moment' in life is often when one confronts true solitude, which can be daunting yet essential for personal rebirth and self-discovery. The hesitance to embrace this solitude is not due to fear of emptiness, but rather the overwhelming nature of such vast personal space, signaling a critical point of change and new beginnings.

Themes

SolitudeSelf-DiscoveryTransformationBirthFear

In practice

Example use cases

During a motivational speech about personal growth, this quote can emphasize the importance of solitude in finding oneself.

More from Helene Cixous

By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display - the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. _x000D_ Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.
Helene CixousRead
Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
Helene CixousRead
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.
Helene CixousRead
Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.
Helene CixousRead
We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.
Helene CixousRead
If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through.
Helene CixousRead

Similar quotes

Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces—the face they get when they’re children, the face they own when they’re grown, and the face they’ve earned when they’re old. But when you live as long as I have, you get many more. I look nothing like I did when I was a wee thing of thirteen. You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.
Catherynne M. ValenteRead
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves... It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.
Kurt VonnegutRead
In the socialist commonwealth every economic change becomes an undertaking whose success can be neither appraised in advance nor later retrospectively determined. There is only groping in the dark. Socialism is the abolition of rational economy.
Ludwig Von MisesRead
Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.
Terry PratchettRead
For in spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.
John DeweyRead
I've always preferred writing about grey characters and human characters. Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, or whatever they are, they're still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.
George R. R. MartinRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.