"She feared discovering, at the end of a long, cruel excavation, that there was no "hidden truth," that there never had been. She (truth) was not at the beginning, there was no secret, There were only mistakes and corrections. She feared having to, in the end, lose all hope and all illusion. And those who had laways affirmed truth's impossibility would laugh at her. And at the same time she feared, with the other fear, discovering the truth. And seeing in the end with her own eyes her own face unmasked, to her eternal regret. Yet, she told herself, isn't every discovery true? And everything we say is truth. And we only lie in the hope of creating a more tolerable reality."

"The need, at any price, to paint the forbidden. And the truth, if found: he would go so far as to slaughter it in order to contemplate it more truly still."

"This book knew something about her that she didn't want to know."

"One can die from being unable to write in time the book one has in one's body. This is the book that must be braved."

"I was a living example of a terror stronger than everything."

"I've arrived at that desperate, despairing age when one feels closer to solitude than to any human being."

"Living is: advancing straight into the unknown to the point of getting lost. At the risk of losing ourselves. It takes risk."

"We breathe, I who endlessly hold my life's breath, I who hold in my cries of terror and my cries of pleasure for fear of frightening the neighbors and my loved ones."

"It is toward her- this origin- that he goes, the one he cannot do without, that he trembles with fear each time of losing, of not regaining before the door, and who is here, the one who doesn't obey him, she comes, and he can do nothing about it, the one who is stronger than he and who calls on him to travel farther than himself."

"And yet the one I love the most, thinks the author, is the slaughtered one. The one that loses its head. The one that wouldn't have saved me. The one that shows me passion's path, the one that opens its chest, the one that is mad for truth. But it is not out of love that I love it. It is out of necessity."

"The crime is not what we think. It's enoguh to let go of the hand and the harm is done. Your brother's hand."

"But after all, we are not birds, we musn't judge. We do not know what it is to expire beneath the beak of love. We are always in the midst of killing and of being killed almost every day. Everything is our mistake. Our innocence is made up of all the mistakes we haven't made."

"It is this (this severity we need to use against our cowardices) that I am in despair of ever reaching during my lifetime."

"The landscape that we recognize without ever having seen it is this one, the one from the Bible. Oh how its roughness speaks to us. I have a goats greediness for it. It promises usthirst, solitude, enraged hope. It delivers us wholly naked up to the existence of God."

"I will give you all at once: ecstasy and disgust on the same plate, in the same day. We are inseparable...Would I refuse my life in freedom? My life plus? The land of my greatest strength? Would I refuse my mystery and my madness?"

"Of course, sometimes I bury myself for a long time in boredom."

"Yes, the night costs me much more than dearly. At night, nothing and no one sleep anymore. Passions, wounds, scars, men, women, children, everything is awake. It is indeed the Bible and its rocks."

"In order to find the tongue of God, one must passs through atrocious silences."

"What she accomplished was oen of our worst secrets: in the very heart of our intimacy our personal solitude grows. She was in the process of realizing an instant of fidelity to our human solitude...to dare to declare solitude."

"Choosing like a woman: the best of herself, the strongest, the most alarming, the most naked."

"Because we need to accuse ourselves."

"I want to go where I cannot go. I want to leap over myself and land on the other side of myself. The truth is further on. I want further. Where I'm afraid to go: that's where I want to go."

"I wouldn't want to have not received all the blows that have opened the dark-green eyes in my wall. I need to feel beneath my fingers the fissures and scars and trace the treasure map on the skin of my soul. I explore myself. I terrify myself. I spread without modesty my bloods and my excrements: you will never read what I write."

"If this is a betrayal, I ask to be judged in my entirety. I will come with all my lives and all my words."

"I wonder if we have the right to dream in place of reality, or if that is a crime to our near and dear."

"To live from so little, isn't that a sin? against need and against hunger? Sin against us, beings of the human sort? And against my mother, who bings me trays of vegetables arranged like paintings and asks me: what is this book about?"

"I don't love you. I have the world inhabited by you."

"I am before words. I possess the unknown power of myself, which is nakedness. I plunge."

from Helene Cixous' FirstDays of the Year