Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing Quotes

“That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. “The miracle into which the child and the poet walk” [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there…The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says—one very small line lost in his writing—“to the depths, to the depths.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“Reading is not as insignificant as we claim. First we must steal the key to the library. Reading is a provocation, a rebellion: we open the book’s door, pretending it is a simple paperback cover, and in broad daylight escape! We are no longer there: this is what real reading is. If we haven’t left the room, if we haven’t gone over the wall, we’re not reading.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“This is what writing is: I one language, I another language, and between the two, the line that makes them vibrate; writing forms a passageway between two shores.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“So it gives us everything, it gives us the end of the world; to be human we need to experience the end of the world. We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is. Without that, we know nothing about the mortality and immortality that we carry. We don’t know that we’re alive as long as we haven’t encountered death: these are the banalities that have been erased. And is isan act of grace.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“Those I love go in the direction of what they call the last hour—what Clarice Lispector calls, “the hour of the star,” “the hour of relinquishing all the lies that have helped us live.

Writing or saying the truth is equivalent to death, since we cannot tell the truth. It is forbidden because it hurts everyone. We never say the truth, we must lie, mostly as a result of our two needs: our need for love and cowardice.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“They will never forgive us for this Somewhere Else.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“The writer is a secret criminal. How? First because writing tries to undertake the journey toward strange sources of art that are foreign to us. “The thing” does not happen here, it happens somewhere else, in a strange and foreign country. The writer has a foreign origin; we do not know the particular nature of these foreigners, but we feel they feel there is an appeal, that someone is calling them back.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“We then spend our lives not seeing what we saw. The picture is there: what we know when we’re small; when we are small, we know everything in a childlike way.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One's own night. Walking through the self toward dark.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“I will talk about truth again, without which (without the word truth, without the mystery truth) there would be no writing. It is what writing wants. But it “(the truth)” is totally down below and a long way off. And all the people I love and whom I have mentioned are beings who are bent on directing their writing toward this truth-over-there, with unbelievable labor; they are fighting against the elements and principally agains the innumerable immediate exterior and interior enemies.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“Writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“To us this ladder has a descending movement, because the ascent, which evokes effort and difficulty, is toward the bottom. I say ascent downward because we ordinarily believe the descent is easy. The writers I love are descenders, explorers of the lowest and deepest.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“If the truth about loving or hateful choices were revealed it would break open the earth's crust. Which is why we live in legalized and general delusion. Fiction takes the place of reality. This is why simply naming one of these turns of the unconscious that are part of our strange human adventure engenders such upsets (which are at once intimate, individual, and political); why consciously or unconsciously we constantly try to save ourselves from this naming.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“We are criminals and we do not know how to express or prove that we are criminals. The problem is that if, as criminals, we were recognized as such, we would have to pay for the crime. Yet if we paid, the crime would disappear and our debt would be wiped out. We must keep our crime in order to keep our crime safe, to avoid the terrible fate of being forgiven.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“The author is not only the one who signs but also a completely unknown person blended with (legendary,] mythical, complex, variable consanguinity.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing