Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
Helene CixousRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Cixous emphasizes the importance of women expressing themselves through writing, reclaiming their identity and bodily autonomy.
Helene Cixous asserts that writing is a means for women to reclaim their bodies and voices, which society has often marginalized or censored. By urging women to 'write their selves,' Cixous encourages a profound connection between the body and expression, suggesting that true self-discovery and liberation stem from overcoming internal and societal inhibitions.
Themes
WritingBodyIdentitySelf-ExpressionFeminismConsciousness
In practice
Example use cases
An author discussing women's literature in a panel might quote Cixous to emphasize the importance of self-expression.
More from Helene Cixous
All quotes βYou 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
Similar quotes
The fact that we can't easily foresee clues that would betray an intelligence a million millennia farther down the road suggests that we're like ants trying to discover humans. Ask yourself: Would ants ever recognize houses, cars, or fire hydrants as the work of advanced biology?
Seth ShostakRead
All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.
Abraham MaslowRead
What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean. It is all part of the illusion that there should seem to be something to be gained in the future, and that there is an urgent necessity to go on and on until we get it. Yet just as there is no time but the present, and no one except the all-and-everything, there is never anything to be gained - though the zest of the game is to pretend that there is.
Alan WattsRead
Life is but a day; A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way From a tree's summit.
John KeatsRead
All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake. Not that it's wrong to try to improve the world if you know how but simply because struggling and striving are the worst possible ways to go about doing anything!
George Bernard ShawRead
Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value.
Ayn RandRead