Helene Quotes & Sayings

My father had the main barber- and beauty-supply business in the African-American community in Buffalo. — Helene D. Gayle

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

A man doesn't want to be rejected. We're really quite sensitive.
'Sensitive?' She laughed, her head on one side. 'Sensitive egos you mean. Never met a man who didn't have one of those. — Helene Young

Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard. — Helene Cixous

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

Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable. — Helene Cixous

The environmental community has an opportunity to create and leverage partnerships with the development community on social issues, rather than trying to develop new expertise of its own. — Helene D. Gayle

Real, sustainable community change requires the initiative and engagement of community members. — Helene D. Gayle

Let me see if I understand correctly now," the Jinni said at one point. "You and your relations believe that a ghost living in the sky can grant you wishes." "That is a gross oversimplification, and you know it." "And yet, according to men, we jinn are nothing but children's tales?" "This is different. This is about religion and faith." "And where exactly is the difference?" "Are you honestly asking, or being deliberately insulting?" "I'm honestly asking. — Helene Wecker

One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One's own night. Walking through the self toward dark. — Helene Cixous

When I write, all those that we don't know we can be write themselves from me, without exclusion, without prediction, and everything that we will be calls us to the tireless, intoxicating, tender-costly-search for love. We will never lack ourselves. — Helene Cixous

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

For many people traveling can have deep psychological meaning. — Helene Deutsch

The knife to heart is always a surprise;
it isn't the fashion to name evil
or forever bind a liar to their lies. — Talie Helene

Love those you find unlovable. The Lord has promised to reward you. - Helene C. Kuoni - — Gary Chapman

But I am just a woman who thinks her duty is not to forget. And this duty, which I believe I must fulfill, is: "as a woman" living now I must repeat again and again "I am a woman," because we exist in an epoch still so ancient and ignorant and slow that there is still always the danger of gynocide. — Helene Cixous

The author is not only the one who signs but also a completely unknown person blended with (legendary,] mythical, complex, variable consanguinity. — Helene Cixous

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

They grab you by the breasts, they pluck your derriere, they stuff you in a pot, they saute you with sperm, they grab you by the beak, they stick you in a house, they fatten you up on conjugal oil, they shut you up in your cage. And now, lay. — Helene Cixous

- 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

We must learn to speak the language women speak when there is no one there to correct us. — Helene Cixous

We must grow beyond it! Why reinforce our differences, and keep ancient laws, and never know the joy of breaking bread with our neighbors? — Helene Wecker

A bouquet yellow like remorse
Hurts my view
The cage
The wheel
The vile ennui of all mankind
And no one no one to break my chains!
("Outcries") — Helene Baronne D'Oettingen

Now that the book is out in the world, I'm amazed all over again at what my friend did for me in prompting me to ditch realism for a more magical approach. In some ways, the Golem and the Jinni are the ultimate immigrants. They aren't just new to New York or America; they're new to people. Like those around them, they wrestle with issues of religion versus doubt and duty versus self-determination - but as inescapable aspects of their own otherworldly natures. For seven years I've lived with their questions, arguments, and adventures, and it's been one of the greatest gifts of my life. — Helene Wecker

Those who are locked up know better than their jailers the taste of free air. — Helene Cixous

Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way. — Helene Cixous

But already his mind was racing ahead to his next encounter with humans. There was, he knew, a small encampment of Bedouin nearby. He'd spied their sheep-flocks and their fires from a distance, their men traveling on horseback, but until now he'd avoided them. He wondered, how did their lives differ from those of the caravan-men? Perhaps, instead of finding another caravan to follow, he would turn his wanderings toward their encampment. But should he remain content with observing them from a distance, when a much more intimate option lay available to him? — Helene Wecker

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

Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds. — Helene Cixous

Wildlife needs wilderness-not just to survive, but also to live freely. Sadly, many species struggle to survive due to increased human activity and expansion into habitats they call home. — Zoe Helene

If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much. — Helene Hanff

You make me thirsty, Promethea, my river, you make me eternally thirsty, my water. As if I had spent my life in an old house of dried mud, so dry myself that I could not even thirst, until yesterday. And suddenly yesterday, the dusty floor of my old house burst open and while I was still dozing away my parched existence, drop by drop I heard the music of coolness awaken the thirst under my dry soul. And leaning over the dark shaft of my life, I saw my childhood springs unearthed. Is that always how (by accident) we rediscover Magdalenian riches? — Helene Cixous

Marcel was from Louisiana, so for four years Emily had been southern by association. She insisted on Lynchburg Lemonades. She scheduled interviews around the Gators. She championed gentility. Anyone at a dinner party who thought they could tell a joke making fun of the region encountered a faceful of Emily, quick and ferocious as a convert, as a woman who loved a man.
Emily now had no claim to the South. The region and its interests would proceed without her. — Marie-Helene Bertino

The gods are made of marble
Deep inside a museum
A quadruped monster beckons me to approach
("Outcries") — Helene Baronne D'Oettingen

The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed — Helene Cixous

Nick looked to the sky again, searching for a last glimpse of the shiny jet. 'For us, maybe, but courtesy of Nina and her reckless ambition Ellie Wilding will remember this day for the rest of her life. — Helene Young

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

We match each other stroke for stroke until I get a hit on her right arm.

She tries to switch sword arms, but I jab my scim at her wrist faster than she can parry. Her scim goes flying, and I tackle her. Her white-blonde hair tumbles free of her bun.

"Surrender!" I pin her down at the wrists, but she trashes and rips one arm free, scrabbling for a dagger at her waist. Steel stabs at my ribs, and seconds later, I am on my back with a blade at my throat.

"Ha!" She leans down, her hair falling around us like a shimmering silver curtain. — Sabaa Tahir

Writing is the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me. — Helene Cixous

He got up, wishing to go around, but the aunt handed him the snuffbox right over Helene, behind her back. Helene moved forward so as to make room and, smiling, glanced around. As always at soirees, she was wearing a gown in the fashion of the time, quite open in front and back. Her bust, which had always looked like marble to Pierre, was now such a short distance from him that he could involuntarily make out with his nearsighted eyes the living loveliness of her shoulders and neck, and so close to his lips that he had only to lean forward a little to touch her. He sensed the warmth of her body, the smell of her perfume, and the creaking of her corset as she breathed. He saw not her marble beauty, which made one with her gown, he saw and sensed all the loveliness of her body, which was merely covered by clothes. And once he had seen it, he could not see otherwise, as we cannot return to a once-exposed deception. — Leo Tolstoy

I look at what we call faith, and all I see is superstition and subjugation. All religions [ ... ] They create false divisions, and enslave us to fantasies, when we need to focus on the here and now. — Helene Wecker

It's so interesting, you know, whenever you read the accounts of composers playing their own music, that they had very different priorities than performers. None of them seemed too concerned about the plastic realization of their music. — Helene Grimaud

When you are old, at evening candle-lit
beside the fire bending to your wool,
read out my verse and murmur, "Ronsard writ
this praise for me when I was beautiful."
And not a maid but, at the sound of it,
though nodding at the stitch on broidered stool,
will start awake, and bless love's benefit
whose long fidelities bring Time to school.
I shall be thin and ghost beneath the earth
by myrtle shade in quiet after pain,
but you, a crone, will crouch beside the hearth
mourning my love and all your proud disdain.
And since what comes to-morrow who can say?
Live, pluck the roses of the world to-day. — Pierre De Ronsard

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

Talent is the infinite capacity for taking pains. Genius is the infinite capacity for achievement without taking any pains at all. — Helene Hanff

In the synagogue of my heart ...
I myself jail and the jailed, I go wounded, bite-marked — Helene Cixous

Was it really worth it? I wondered again.

I wanted to believe it had been but could not help feeling cynical about how history repeats itself. There still were the same political intrigues, the hate groups that thrive on terror and human misery and I knew that there were enough egos and self-indulging crusaders to fuel another war, and another... — Helene Deschamps-Adams

WILL YOU TELL MEGAN WELLS SHE IS OUT OF HER COTTONPICKING MIND? if she's that bored with civilization why doesn't she just move to a siberian salt mine? — Helene Hanff

The more you look into health and health inequalities, you realize that a lot of it is not due to a particular disease - it's really linked to underlying societal issues such as poverty, inequity, lack of access to safe drinking water and housing. And these are all the things we focus on at CARE. — Helene D. Gayle

Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. — Helene Cixous

People do not see you, / They invent you and accuse you. — Helene Cixous

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

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

We carry our ancestors in our names and sometimes we carry our ancestors through the sliding doors of emergency rooms and either way they are heavy, man, either way we can't escape. — Marie-Helene Bertino

The trash bags are gone, the bar wiped clean. The lights have been hung; they line the stage and loop around the Snakehead, making the old axe glow. Stalled in the doorway, Lorca experiences a stomachache he can only call Christmas. — Marie-Helene Bertino

Thinking about him requires so little effort that she can do it while performing mindless activities. Soaping the dishes, replaiting Clare Kelley's hair, drying the dishes. The part of her brain that plays his ongoing reel is unconnected to the neurons and synapses that control things like conscious thought and logic. Ben turning to her at a party. Ben turning to her. Ben turning. What human being deserves to be the nucleus of such high esteem? Certainly not Benjamin, middle name Hal, last name Allen. Five-nine in boots. Who has a car that doesn't start on cold mornings, an unfinished screenplay, a law degree he doesn't use, a romantic's tendency to save movie stubs, and a mannered, unsmiling wife. — Marie-Helene Bertino

There are many ways of doing it but Mummy and I think this is the simplest for you to try. Put a cup of flour, an egg, a half cup of milk and a good shake of salt into a large bowl and beat altogether until it is the consistency of thick cream. Put in the frig for several hours. (It's best if you make it in the morning.) When you put your roast in the oven, put in an extra pan to heat. Half an hour before your roast is done, pour a bit of the roast grease into the baking pan, just enough to cover the bottom will do. The pan must be very hot. Now pour the pudding in and the roast and pudding will be ready at the same time. — Helene Hanff

Judge a man by his actions, not his thoughts. — Helene Wecker

Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? — Helene Cixous

Hold still we're going to do your portrait, so that you can begin looking like it right away. — Helene Cixous

After all, the ultimate goal of all research is not objectivity, but truth. — Helene Deutsch

Being reflective also means listening to your inner self with new ears. The truth is, we think we've heard our own story so much that we stop listening to it! We become like the people in our lives who we complain don't listen to us. With reflection, we listen freshly to our selves, the way we would like to be listened to. There — Helene Brenner

[a] heavy sense of guilt [is] the most potent factor in the whole psychologic picture of motherliness. — Helene Deutsch

The insanity of love, and that's why you're trying to drive away with the park brake on. — Helene Young

It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been: it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghost of its former owner points me to things I've never read before. — Helene Hanff

We are consciousness wanting to expand. — Helene Cardona

And I? I drink, I burn, I gather dreams.
And sometimes I tell a story. Because Promethea asks me for a bowl of words before she goes to sleep. — Helene Cixous

That person is lonely who has no one for whom he or she is Number One. — Helene Deutsch

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

Good morning, the city says. Fuck you. — Marie-Helene Bertino

He'd lived so long in anticipation of his own death that to contemplate his future was like standing at the edge of a cliff, staring into a vertiginous rush of open sky. — Helene Wecker

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

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

Power belongs to the smallest and to the dead. — Helene Cixous

I never overcame my conviction that writing for commercial television was a kind of prostitution. — Helene Hanff

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

I felt stuck in a Sisyphean loop, writing the same press release over and over. Even more, I was tired of promoting other people's creations instead of creating something myself. I imagined myself on my deathbed, and I could hear my biggest regret: I never even tried to be a writer. — Helene Wecker

We packed
whole lives into bundles in search
of what chooses us, what wants to come
back to the surface, what needs to be said.
We had so many dreams
we didn't know what to make of them. — Helene Cardona

Sometimes men want what they don't have because they don't have it. Even if everyone offered to share, they would only want the share that wasn't theirs. — Helene Wecker

Her father, indulgent in his concern, had opened his library to her, and at last she could read to her heart's content. In all, these past few weeks had been some of the most peaceable of her life. She had the sense of existing inside a fragile pause, a moment of grace. — Helene Wecker

Early marriage is most prevalent in communities suffering deep, chronic poverty. — Helene D. Gayle

Other-Love is writing's first name. — Helene Cixous

A true solitude is not unbearable since it allows for otherness. — Helene Cixous

Decisive moment: the one when you will be really alone. And it is perhaps this that makes her hesitate: not the void, but the vastness of the solitude. It's as well if you are frightened of solitude. It's a sign that you have come to the moment of your birth. — Helene Cixous

Buying a book you've never read is like buying a dress you've never tried on — Helene Hanff

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

What did people do when the ones they needed died? She lay curled on her bed, feeling as though part of her chest had been roughly scooped out, left raw and exposed. — Helene Wecker

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

They will never forgive us for this Somewhere Else. — Helene Cixous

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

Why take the time to convince me? If I disagree you could simply kill me, take Fadwa, and do whatever you like." Ibn Malik raised an eyebrow. "True. But I prefer reason and agreement. Allies are much more useful than bodies. — Helene Wecker

We always say at CARE that we would love to see if we can work ourselves out of business. — Helene D. Gayle

The ultimate aim is reverence for the universe.
The ultimate aim is love for life.
The ultimate aim is harmony within oneself. — Helene Cardona

This cocktail may be virgin, but you won't be after drinking it. Schisandra is a superberry, an adaptogen and ... an aphrodisiac. — Zoe Helene

Thanks, Ms Wilding.'

She raised one eyebrow. 'Who?'

'You must be Tom's daughter, the photographer. You look like him. A prettier version, sexy, even.' His laugh was a smoky rumble as he spun on his heel.

'Don't presume to know anything about me, Mr Lawson.'

He hefted his pack and strode away, power in the length of stride. — Helene Young

When a sin comes back (its memory) you absolutely must bury it. How to bury the memory of a sin that comes from a distant past? I shut it up in a clay pot. Then I dug right into the cold hard ground, deep down. Without of course telling anyone what I had in the pot,then I stuck this pot the size of a little quart saucepan into the ground and I covered the hole in the ground with ice for a long time, and that despite the presence of people who had no inkling what I was ridding myself of in this little improvised coffin. — Helene Cixous

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

The embattled gates to equal rights indeed opened up for modern women, but I sometimes think to myself; that is not what I meant by freedom, it is only social progress. — Helene Deutsch

That can be the cruelest part of happiness--its tendency to disguise itself in boredom."
- Marie-Helene Bertino, Safe as Houses, title story — Marie-Helene Bertino

There's always the syndrome of the parent-child relationship: when someone has known you since you were very young, it doesn't matter how much more independent, how much older or more mature you get - there is still that element, the dynamic of the relationship that is very hard to successfully transform, and that has nothing to do with the music-making, in the end. — Helene Grimaud