Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
Interpretation
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.
In practice
In a workshop on creative writing, to inspire participants to dig deeper into their personal stories.
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.
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.
Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.
We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.
If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through.
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.
Actors should arouse a sense of wonder because of their ability to exceed what the spectators can envision ever being able to do.
I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure - like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel - can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us.
I don't believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out.
A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.
There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.
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