"Coming to Writing" and Other Essays Quotes

“And so when you have lost everything, no more roads, no direction, no fixed signs, no ground, no thoughts able to resist other thoughts, when you are lost, beside yourself, and you continue getting lost, when you become the panicky movement of getting lost, then, that’s when, where you are unwoven weft, flesh that lets strangeness come through, defenseless being, without resistance, without batten, without skin, inundated with otherness, it’s in these breathless times that writings traverse you, songs of an unheard-of purity flow through you, addressed to no one, they well up, surge forth, from the throats of your unknown inhabitants, these are the cries that death and life hurl in their combat.”
― Hélène Cixous, "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays

“Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.”
― Hélène Cixous, "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays

“Writing to touch with letters, with lips, with breath, to caress with the tongue, to lick with the soul, to taste the blood of the beloved body, of life in its remoteness; to saturate the distance with desire; in order to keep it from reading you.”
― Hélène Cixous, "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays

“So I'll take all your books. But the cathedrals I'll leave behind. Their stone is sad and male.”
― Hélène Cixous, "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays