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An old cardboard box: you think it but you don't say it.
Leftovers, that are swept up and glued together.
I am your alipte, I say, I am your personal trainer and masseuse. I oil you.
But there's no ointment against the bad thoughts and phantasms. ~ Helene Cixous
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The most beautiful things cannot be written, unfortunately. Fortunately. We would have to be able to write with our eyes, with wild eyes, with the tears of our eyes, with the frenzy of a gaze, with the skin of our hands. ~ Helene Cixous
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Beauty will no longer be forbidden. ~ Helene Cixous
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I would touch its walls with my fingers and its ceilings with my looks, I would invoke the powers of writing, I would bathe my soul in the rivers of unknown thoughts that genius unrolls when surrounded by the song of all the books its heart receives the marvelous measures of its own speech ... ~ Helene Cixous
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The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that
the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them
by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent
of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation
is imperative. ~ Helene Cixous
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Love is when you suddenly wake up as a cannibal, and not just any old cannibal, or else wake up destined for devourment. ~ Helene Cixous
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(Because Jonah's real story is the one never told: never was he as stupendously happy as during those three days and three nights of eternity. He was granted an experience that women dream of: he lived when he was mature in the adored whale's belly. In real paradise. How does one get there? By disobedience. By passion. Running away.) ~ Helene Cixous
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Go, fly, swim, bound descend, cross, love the unknown, love the uncertain, love what has not yet been seen, love no one, whom you are, whom you will be, leave yourself, shrug off the old lies, dare what you don't dare, it is there that you will take pleasure ... and rejoice, in the terror, follow it where you're afraid to go, go ahead, take the plunge, you're on the right trail. ~ Helene Cixous
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But underneath it all I tell myself the tiny glow-worm of the Leave event will be blinking. Up to me to surmount the trial, everything is dependent upon my will, impotent, tenacious, helpless, dogged, with a swollen sense of honor, I tell myself. I know me. Not that I'm the strongest as my friend used to claim, but I've always had the strength - weakness maybe - to believe that if "in the end we die, too fast," as he puts it, later on, as sequel, there's a chance that someone-I-don't-know-who - or I-don't-know-what - may come back. No keeping oneself from dying. Afterwards nothing stops one returning. ~ Helene Cixous
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This is a book of raw flesh. ~ Helene Cixous
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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. ~ Helene Cixous
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Those who are locked up know better than their jailers the taste of free air. ~ Helene Cixous
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She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language. She lets the other language speak - the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. To life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible. ~ Helene Cixous
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In woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history. As a militant, she is an integral part of all liberations. ~ Helene Cixous
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Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me. ~ Helene Cixous
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It makes me cry, I want to talk about something I am not sure I can talk about, I want to talk about the inside from the inside, I do not want to leave it
I am so happy in the silky damp dark of the labyrinth and there is no thread ~ Helene Cixous
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Sometimes I wait for you at the exact edge of the jetty where we left each other. Sometimes I disappear into an unconscious hole and lie there silted up in stories having nothing to do with the vigorous immediacy of our epic. ~ Helene Cixous
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Hold still we're going to do your portrait, so that you can begin looking like it right away. ~ Helene Cixous
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I will always be there, I will say to you, the next time. Even after the door. It's neither a gift nor a promise. It's a natural phenomenon. As durable but no more so than a mountain. You can climb on me for millions of years. I am stable, etched by ravines, immobile, torn and flooded by torrential springs. ~ Helene Cixous
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Other-Love is writing's first name. ~ Helene Cixous
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You can go on losing after loss. ~ Helene Cixous
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I ... overflow; my desires have invented new desire, my body knows unheard-of-songs. Time and again ... I have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst - burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. ~ Helene Cixous
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What happens: events interiors, snatch them from the cradle, from the source. I want to watch watching arrive. I want to watch arrivances. I want to find the root of needing to eat. And taste it: work of sweat / sleep. ~ Helene Cixous
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This whole book is composed of first pages. ~ Helene Cixous
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All that because Promethea is a woman? All this uproar, this trembling, this resistance?
Yes. No. Y-Yes ... Naynayno. Whynoyes.
Yes, Promethea is a woman.
Yes, but "because is a woman," that is not important.
But no it precisely its not being important that is so important. ~ Helene Cixous
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Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable. ~ Helene Cixous
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And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for "great men"; and it's "silly."
Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time. ~ Helene Cixous
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Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn't painfully lost her wind). She doesn't "speak," she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it's with her body that she vitally sup- ports the "logic" of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she's thinking; she signifies it with her body. In a certain way she inscribes what she's saying, because she doesn't deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. Her speech, even when "theoretical" or political, is never simple or linear or "objectified," generalized: she draws her story into history. ~ Helene Cixous
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I will not say: that is because I am a city that does not want to surrender. Beseige me. It is because I am a deep, cool pyramid. Go through me. Pass through all my rooms and know my subterfuge. But you are passing right by the little room that I want to keep closed, and you don't see it. There is a secret. I myself do not know it, I just know it exists. ~ Helene Cixous
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What I'd saved: lost. Worse: I lost it. Can't even tell myself that I sort of lost it that lost I keep it still. I lost the saved.
I've lost. I'm lost.
This is pain, one dies of or kills. Kill it and one kills oneself.
Splashes of bloody skin all over my notebooks.
I haven't forgotten a dream, as it is written happens in the realm of dreams. One forgets a dream, then one forgets one has forgotten, nothing dies of this.
I've lost The Dream.
I cannot tell a soul. I will not enter alive into the beyond. I search for an explanation. To the labyrinth I descend with the chapeau. Maleficent remains but remains, therefore blessed. If I could ask my friend. No one else. He and only he knows the extraordinary value of what is lost, greater by far that the value of what one keeps. Suddenly I'm only this torch consuming itself. What to do? I had the papers, I took them from myself, I threw them in the Trash, I threw out my own being, I had the memory of the future at the window I broke me, I tore up the secret into a thousand pieces, I tweezed the sublime out of me, I had god I squashed him with a hat,
this is not the first time I take myself to the labyrinth but this is the first time I go down into the labyrinth. I went right by the very trash bin of my being, how can you do away with your own eyes, I did it, who knows how ~ Helene Cixous
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I do believe in poetry. I believe that there are creatures endowed with the power to put things together and bring them back to life ~ Helene Cixous
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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. ~ Helene Cixous
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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. ~ Helene Cixous
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Almost every day I can feel myself suffering mainly in the head, I can explain the pain to myself but knowing it comes from an inflammation of my imagination doesn't prevent it being reality itself. What's more I'd be crazy not to go crazy. We don't know what an illness is. On awful hurts we plaster little old words, as if we could think hell with a paper bandage. ~ Helene Cixous
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The author is not only the one who signs but also a completely unknown person blended with (legendary,] mythical, complex, variable consanguinity. ~ Helene Cixous
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In the synagogue of my heart ...
I myself jail and the jailed, I go wounded, bite-marked ~ Helene Cixous
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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. ~ Helene Cixous
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I ask of writing what I ask of desire: that it have no relation to the logic which puts desire on the side of possession, of acquisition, or even of that consumption-consummation which, when pushed to its limits with such exultation, links (false) consciousness with death ~ Helene Cixous
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I, too, overflow; ... my body knows unheard-of songs. ~ Helene Cixous
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And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying. ~ Helene Cixous
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Suddenly I'd had Enough and this was no turn of phrase but a warm body, nervous, with a constitution I could count on like a younger brother. That's when I told my mother: on the other side it's really underdeveloped. We're going back. Really, I said: I want to go back, not possible unless Mummy who is part of me comes too. We wait in the empty street at the stop for Lethe, the only bus that runs both ways. My mother is losing patience. The bus doesn't come. It's not easy to wait for a bus you've heard is the only one that runs both ways. I check the guidebook. Neither Canto XIV of the Iliad nor Canto XI of the Odyssey mentions the place. Just what you'd expect for Lethe I tell myself. Naturally forgetfulness attracts attention to itself by means of absence and omission. But for my mother the bus not turning up is the theme of her nightmares. I explain that in this country one comes along every quarter of an hour...To signal to the vehicle that one wishes to board Oblivion Return one must fan open the grille by pressing a button and lighting up the small lantern on the top of the archway, which I did. It's the one gleam of hope in this world. ~ Helene Cixous
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-I am being killed by what keeps me from dying.
And next the sea became very small no bigger than a bathtub. Rolling in pain crashed over and over again onto the edges of the world. Then a divinity fished her out. ~ Helene Cixous
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I did not even know this existed ... this world, I did not know. I thought it existed only in one's head, and in dreams ... And now: here I am. ~ Helene Cixous
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We've been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty; we've been victims of the old fool's game: each one will love the other sex. I'll give you your body and you'll give me mine. ~ Helene Cixous
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It beings with fear, passion begins with a fear. Fear is the trembling of faith. One cannot have faith without being afraid. One cannot have faith, no human being. Being human is that: to have faith that's been fractured then stuck back together. ~ Helene Cixous
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Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away - that's how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak - even just open her mouth - in public. A double distress, for even if she transgresses, her words fall almost always upon the deaf male ear, which hears in language only that which speaks in the masculine. ~ Helene Cixous
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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. ~ Helene Cixous
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I am not innocent. Innocence is a science of the sublime. And I am only at the very beginning of the apprenticeship. ~ Helene Cixous
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It is essential to exchange the invisible ring for all that we call survival, survive, survivor. ~ Helene Cixous
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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. ~ Helene Cixous
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The more I anoint the more my mind adheres physically to the mysterious fabric of love.
I am decutie. Worn thin. You know that word? ~ Helene Cixous
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It is easy to love and sing one's love. That is something I am extremely good at doing. Indeed, that is my art. But to be loved, that is true greatness. Being loved, letting oneself be loved, entering the magic and dreadful circle of generosity, receiving gifts, finding the right thank-you's, that is love's real work. ~ Helene Cixous
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Voice-cry. Agony
the spoken "word" exploded, blown to bits by suffering and anger, demolishing discourse: this is how she has always been heard before, ever since the time when masculine society began to push her offstage, expulsing her, plundering her. Ever since Medea, ever since Electra. ~ Helene Cixous
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To be afraid is the condition of loving knowledge. Were I not dying of fear, I'd not know how to exist myself, I wouldn't get the notices of existence, I wouldn't record with delight the miniscule passage of a blue tit, its wing dipped in gold on the dusk. Were I not dying of sorrow I wouldn't with nostalgia be present at the creation of the world, the squirrel nuptials this morning I wouldn't care. Creatures are born to a backdrop of adieux. ~ Helene Cixous
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In front of us there is an immense garden of words and non-words, a serre, that is, a greenhouse in which are preserved by my care so many things of speech you have given me while leaving me free to cultivate them. ~ Helene Cixous
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We are learning to live with death, with the dead, we are learning with the life of our death in us, to live with cats, with mother, with envelopes, with secrets, to live each instant, we are learning to live, we are learning but we don't know.
Envelopes of instants: are they life, are they death? The answer depends on my force of relife. Today I have the Force. Everything is living. Tomorrow we'll see. Today I have the Force of ascent. ~ Helene Cixous
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I am sick of death and worst of all this sickness feeds on itself, the more afraid I am the more I am afraid the more I flee the more I am afraid the more I am haunted. ~ Helene Cixous
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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 ~ Helene Cixous
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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. ~ Helene Cixous
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We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it's very healthy, because it's the only place where we never lie. At night we don't lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life. ~ Helene Cixous
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Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us. ~ Helene Cixous
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Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way. ~ Helene Cixous
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One must have travelled a great deal to discover the obvious. One must have thoroughly rubbed and exhausted one's own eyes to get rid of the thousands of scales we start with...There are poets who have strived to do this...in quest of what I call the second innocence, the one that comes after knowing, the one that no longer knows, the one that knows how not to know. ~ Helene Cixous
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And it is characteristic of the devil to be recognized too late. ~ Helene Cixous
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All I know: I could only encounter you, my oasis, coming out of a desert. Deserted myself. This is all right. My futureless and solitary self. When suddenly I hear the voice of the springs--Right away you made me want to sing. To cry. Then to drink. But after the desert, the merest trickle of water sounds like a storm. And ever since, Promethea's every murmur shakes my life like an earthquake. I was asleep. I was not thirsty. It would have been possible for me not to hear the first three tears. Ever since I never sleep. I listen. ~ Helene Cixous
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Everything ends with flowers. ~ Helene Cixous
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I Drink. I Burn. I Dream.
And Sometimes, I tell Stories ! ~ Helene Cixous
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These days I am in a super-acute, a hyped-up life. It never goes to sleep.

And yet all the events of this hyped-up life seem to be cut from the hyperdream. All of them turn up accompanied by a voice that murmurs to my heart "it's not going to last. ~ Helene Cixous
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And I want to become a woman I can love. I want to meet women who love themselves, who are alive, who are not debased, overshadowed, wiped out. ~ Helene Cixous
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I would like so much to be the freest of free women: so free that I would even be liberated from the painful sensation of being liberated. I would like to be so freely free that I would never even think to say to myself: "How free I am! ~ Helene Cixous
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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. ~ Helene Cixous
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- Losing is all that's left, I say.
- Losing is all we've got left to lose, you say
The impossibility of not telling, I cannot do otherwise, one can only tell otherwise, with always the same need to make sense of what you've lost, the need not to lose this feeling of losing, the need to feel yourself not losing this feeling that you are still losing the irreplaceable. ~ Helene Cixous
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This is how I want you: larger and smaller stronger and weaker taller and trembling more, more out of breath that I more burning more penetrating bolder bossier more yielding more frightened narrower and more relentless than you are more than I. ~ Helene Cixous
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Promethea has awakened in me dreams extinguished for thousands of years; sometimes one catches on fire even through so many icy layers. Promethea has rekindled dreams of fire in me, dreams of abysses, they are terribly dangerous dreams: as long as they are dreams alone, as long as one dreams alone, one can fool around with dreaming, because afterward one forgets. But now, ever since I learned how Promethea brings the fire of all dreams up into reality, how she climbs back up through the shaft of the Red Cows, bearing the first fire, how she crosses the Chamber of the Mares, how she goes through every epoch of existence reawakening along the walls memories of times so fragile and so inflammable, and comes out in 1982 still carrying in her hands the primitive spark, I feel myself wavering between exultation and terror. Formerly, I too sucked satiny coals. Once I burned my tongue. (That only happens if someone makes you lose faith.) Ever since I have no longer dared suck real fire; for a long time I lived on electricity. But I have never forgotten the fiery taste of eternity. I just was sure that I could live with my tongue extinguished until the end of my days. I was not even tempted. I was calm. I had firm definitions. I called happiness the absence of unhappiness. I wrote in ink and I dedicated my dreams to the Moons. ~ Helene Cixous
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They will never forgive us for this Somewhere Else. ~ Helene Cixous
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To fly/steal is woman's gesture, to steal into language to make it fly. ~ Helene Cixous
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We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. ~ Helene Cixous
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Perhaps within me the desire to put off that which I most in the world desire of late keeps watch, I mean, to write a book but a wounded book, a contentious, broken book, a book not pleased to be a book, to be only a book, to be born in the absence of my friend, a book incapable of acting as if the last times were not upon us, but which at the same time cannot act as if it were only a book hence a being unaware of the end, unaware what time it is. ~ Helene Cixous
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If woman has always functioned "within" the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this "within," to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of. And you'll see with what ease she will spring forth from that "within" - the "within" where once she so drowsily crouched - to overflow at the lips she will cover the foam. ~ Helene Cixous
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When you went away, you left me nothing but the sun-bleached world. You did not even leave me a heart to bleed with. I found I was standing there with no body, and so no voice for calling you. ~ Helene Cixous
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The refugees leave a refuge, enter a refuge run to the windows, what they see makes them move on, they move, refuge means move, move moves on into madness, my book I say is on the move, we are moving each other ~ Helene Cixous
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What is the use of the colon? What is a colon? Generally it opens onto an explanation, but it is always done with the help of an interruption. It can be said that the colon is not the period, it is the period of the period, the canceling of the period. It is a moment mute and marked; it is the most delicate tattoo of the text. It is also in place of, instead of, everything that would be causal. For example, when we read: "It's simply that: secret." "Secret," is a sentence, it is the shortest sentence perhaps. But it is a sentence in one word. It is a sentence that is secret and that at the same time says its name. One could invert and say: "Secret: it is simply that." This is secret, the secret is the secret of this, it is a word which makes infinite sense all by itself, it is a sentence which performs the secret itself [Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans Elizabeth Lowe & Earl Fitz, Foreword by Hélène Cixous trans Verena Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989] ~ Helene Cixous
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So little by little I climb towards life, in the straitjacket of my prison. I don't waste an ounce of air or sun. I explore I bring to light. ~ Helene Cixous
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If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through. ~ Helene Cixous
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Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard. ~ Helene Cixous
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Everything she wanted to tell her, was unable to tell her, because she was afraid of hearing her own voice come out of her heart and be covered with blood, and then she poured all the blood into these syllables, and she offered it to her to drink like this : You have it. ~ Helene Cixous
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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. ~ Helene Cixous
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The author of what I describe is not myself, it is the Other. First of all it is you, it is the woman, it is the queen, it is the Child, it is a person who is greater than I and who surpasses you as well, whom you do not know. I am your scribe. ~ Helene Cixous
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For a week she has been tormented, she burns to write something, gentle warmth emanates from her whole body, but still nothing comes of it. Besides, at the same time she is also busy burning old books, manuals, professional papers, theoretical volumes
because they keep her from doing the one thing that now seems urgent and right to her: shouting her loud hymn of ecstatic pleasure, breaching the tide of the old tongue's hard blare. ~ Helene Cixous
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And this morning I am without fire, my marrow is ash, I am very sad. ~ Helene Cixous
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But Promethea cares carnally about what she says. Watch out for words with her! Because Promethea is the person who has not cut the cord binding words to her body. Everything she says is absolutely fresh. Comes straight from the flesh of her lungs, the fibers of her heart. She doesn't know any other way of speaking. That is why her words are few and fiery. And all her sentences are strong and young and incandescent, because they are caused by a convulsion of her whole earthly body. Promethea's thought is of quivering red lava. And all her remarks date from the beginnings of life. Even concerning details she is cosmogonic. She moves easily to the ends of the earth, the places where life takes on form or loses it. ~ Helene Cixous
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There is no doubt that a woman's economic empowerment is very much interconnected to her health and the well being of her children. ~ Helene D. Gayle
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I liked reading about the nun who ate so dainty with her fingers she never dripped any grease on herself. I've never been able to make that claim and I use a fork. ~ Helene Hanff
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Please write and tell me about London, I live for the day when I step off the boat-train and feel its dirty sidewalks under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley Square and down Wimpole Street and stand in St.Paul's where John Donne preached and sit on the step Elizabeth sat on when she refused to enter the Tower, and like that. A newspaper man I know, who was stationed in London during the war, says tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find exactly what they go looking for. I told him I'd go looking for the England of English literature, and he said:
Then it's there. ~ Helene Hanff
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My father had the main barber- and beauty-supply business in the African-American community in Buffalo. ~ Helene D. Gayle
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I was in no mood to negotiate with the Tampon Terrorist. ~ Helene Boudreau
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We arrived and the miracle happened.
It was the sea and the wind in the bells.
We came from far, from years
Thirsty as dust, from humble
fishermen's nets on barren shore."
~ José Manuel Cardona, from Poems to Circe, The Birnam Wood (El Bosque de Birnam, Consell Insular D'Eivissa, 2007).
Translated from the Spanish by Helene Cardona. ~ José Manuel Cardona
Helene Cixous quotes by José Manuel Cardona
But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: It's there. ~ Helene Hanff
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If you educate a girl, you educate a nation. ~ Helene D. Gayle
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There you are," the man said. A small plate and a fork were in his hands. Irritated, the Jinni said, "Yes, here I am, enjoying a moment of solitude. ~ Helene Wecker
Helene Cixous quotes by Helene Wecker
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