Stigmata Quotes

“For us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love. We love only the person we can eat. The person we hate we ‘can’t swallow.’ That one makes us vomit. Even our friends are inedible. If we were asked to dig into our friend’s flesh we would be disgusted. The person we love we dream only of eating. That is, we slide down that razor’s edge of ambivalence.
The story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. Because loving is wanting and being able to eat up and yet to stop at the boundary. And there, at the tiniest beat between springing and stopping, in rushes fear. The spring is already in mid-air. The heart stops. The heart takes off again. Everything in love is oriented towards this absorption.

At the same time real love is a don’t-touch, yet still an almost-touching. Tact itself: a phantom touching.

Eat me up, my love, or else I’m going to eat you up.

Fear of eating, fear of the edible, fear on the part of the one of them who feels loved, desired, who wants to be loved, desired, who desires to be desired, who knows there is no greater proof of love than the other’s appetite, who is dying to be eaten up, who says or doesn’t say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive. But I often turn about or compromise, because I know that you won’t eat me up, in the end, and I urge you: bite me.

Sign my death with your teeth”
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts

“There is no greater love than the love the wolf feels for the lamb-it-doesn’t-eat.”
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts

“Love is when you suddenly wake up as a cannibal, and not just any old cannibal, or else wake up destined for devourment.”
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts

“Knowledge from experience: the heart goes blind because the need is stronger than anything else. Your ego is blind, your id is eager. It will get to the point of smashing everything. When there is a danger from outside, you bolt, but when the danger comes from inside, how can you bolt? The danger from inside is that complicated thing, the love of the wolf, the complicity that attaches us to that which threatens us.”
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts

“What is this moment called when we suddenly recognize what we have never seen? And which gives us a joy like a wound?”
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts

“Behold the portrait of our mortality”
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts

“This is why I go so willingly into the house of dreams: I admire them for their aptitude for non-discrimination. It is in their house that the equal light from before the guilty feeling reigns. Neither pride, nor shame.”
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts

“This is why we desire so often to die, when we write, in order to see everything in a flash, and at least once shatter the spine of time with only one pencil stroke. — Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts. (Routledge November 12, 1998)”
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts

“I write, I extend my hand; without my knowing it, this is already a prayer, I extend my hand to you so that you will exist because you do exist, beyond my fingers, your fingers, without my knowing it this is already a response, already I draw to my side the site for you, with one hand I call the other hand, it is in this modest, all-powerful way that I begin to save what is lost. When I write I ask for your hand.”
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts

“There is this question of the speed with which things happen around the edges of your heart—and that’s my concern. To escape a predator, a lion, the deer runs faster than itself. It runs with a force greater than it has. That’s a zoological fact: it produces surplus energy. It goes beyond its forces to survive. And it survives the predator, but it doesn’t survive the effort. The lion has been left behind, but the deer dies. It survives, and dies from it.
I believe that in order to escape death, we go through death.”
― Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts