Ars Poetica

Cixous: I had only the 'wrong' reason [to write] (...) passion (...) a mouse is not a prophet (...) but there was madness (...) and inspired me to wild acts (...) as if there might exist somewhere in my body (...) another space, limitless; and there in those zones which inhabit me and which I don't know how to live in, I feel them, I don't live them, they live me, gushing from the wellsprings of my soul, I don't see them but I feel them, it's incomprehensible but that's how it is.
What wants to flow is breath (...) the breath 'wants' a form (...) because it was so strong and furious, I loved and feared this breath (...) To find in myself the possibility of the unexpected. To fall asleep a mouse and wake up an eagle! what delight! What terror.

The human gods, who don't know what they've done; what their visions, their words, do to us.

'It's not me, it's the breath!' 'No one'. And this was true: I didn't think I was anyone (...) 'Being' was reserved for those full, well-defined, scornful people who occupied the world with their assurance.
Perhaps being an adult means no longer asking yourself where you come from, where you're doing, who to be.

Torrent of the silence of the heart.

Woolf: For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

(Novel) It is a structure leaving a shape on the mind's eye (...) The insight is confused; it can no longer distinguish between the true and the false.

Literature is open to everybody (...) Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

She wrote as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten that she is a woman, so that her pages were full of that curious sexual quality which comes only when sex is unconscious of itself (...)