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.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that facing one's fears or challenges can reveal unexpected beauty and joy.
Helene Cixous uses the Medusa as a metaphor for how we often perceive certain things as frightening or dangerous. However, when we confront these fears directly, we may discover that what we initially perceived as scary is actually beautiful and joyful, encouraging us to change our perspective and embrace the unexpected.
In practice
This quote can be used during a motivational speech about overcoming fears.
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.
Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
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.
We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living.
There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over.
You're a religious man, ... You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?' there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler.' Another will say, 'I smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.' Another will say, 'I built houses.' But I will say, 'I didn't forget you.'
The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as largely disposable.
If we will be true and faithful to our principles, committed to a life of honesty and integrity, then no king or contest or fiery furnace will be able to compromise us. For the success of the kingdom of God on earth, may we stand as witnesses for Him "at all times and in all things, and in all places that we may be in, even until death."
In a mouse we admire God's creation and craft work. The same may be said about flies.
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