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Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
Helene Cixous
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Writing enables individuals to express thoughts and feelings that are often hard to admit.

In this quote, Helene Cixous emphasizes the complexity of writing as an art form that serves as a crucial tool for articulating inner truths and hidden emotions that might otherwise remain unspoken. The act of writing is portrayed as a multifaceted task that requires both skill and courage, suggesting that the process can be fraught with challenges as it navigates through the 'unavowable' experiences that individuals may struggle to express.

Themes

WritingExpressionTruthArtCreativity

In practice

Example use cases

In a workshop on creative writing, to inspire participants to dig deeper into their personal stories.

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
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
Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.
Helene CixousRead

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