"Writing: a way of leaving no space for death, of pushing back forgetfulness, of never letting oneself be surprised by the abyss. Of never becoming resigned, consoled; never turning over in bed to face the wall and drift asleep again as if nothing had happened; as if nothing could happen."
— Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing and other Essays”
"Sometimes fear grips me that these fragile moments of life will fade away. It seems that I write against erasure."
— Assia Djebar, “Assia Djebar: The Tireless Walker of Memory” translated by Erin E. Brady and Guillaume Basset (via ArabLit)
"It’s not on paper that you create but in your innards, in the gut and out of living tissue - organic writing I call it. A poem works for me not when it says what I want it to say and not when it evokes what I want it to. It works when the subject I started out with metamorphoses alchemically into a different one, one that has been discovered, or uncovered, by the poem. It works when it surprises me, when it says something I have repressed or pretended not to know. The meaning and worth of my writing is measured by how much I put myself on the line and how much nakedness I achieve."
— Gloria Anzaldúa, ”Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers” (via uber-alles)
(via lademarche)
"I chose to be a writer in girlhood because books rescued me. They were the places where I could bring the broken bits and pieces of myself and put them together again, the places where I could dream about alternative realities, possible futures. They let me know firsthand that if the mind was to be the site of resistance, only the imagination could make it so. To imagine, then, was a way to begin the process of transforming reality. All that we cannot imagine will never come into being."
— bell hooks, “Narratives of Struggle” (via redheadbouquet)
(Source: sevenredumbrellas, via redheadbouquet)
"At a certain moment for the person who has lost everything, whether that means a being or a country, language becomes the country. One enters the country of words."
— Hélène Cixous, “From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History”
"When I wake up just before dawn and hear the throbbing voices of birds as they echo against the silence, I am overpowered by yearning. When I ride in the dark on stark roads through dry, bald hills, I ache with desperate longing. I don’t know what I am longing for, maybe for some place of my own within these images, some place where I fit, instead of being the one human being still awake, the only thing moving across the hills in the arid darkness. Maybe that ache is loneliness. I haven’t found a name for the feeling yet, nor do I know exactly what awakes in me. But instinct warns me that it is too potent for me, that my soul is on the verge of cracking when I feel it that way. I cannot handle the sheer power of those wild emotions by myself. I have to find some way to share them. That is why I write. It’s instinctive. I just have to—because it is awake like lava in my blood, and sustains me."
— Rachel Corrie, Let Me Stand Alone
"I am interested in impossible embodiments. I wish to write; I wish to write about certain things that cannot be held. I want to create a sea of freely-flowing words of no definite form and shape waves of fluent exactness."
— Virginia Woolf, Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909 (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
"Write? I was dying of desire for it, of love, dying to give writing what it had given to me."
— Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing“ (via Interior Forest)
"Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."
— Joan Didion, from “On Keeping a Notebook”, in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays” (via mitochondria)
(via inaliums)
"I’m writing
to hold on to you."
— Henriikka Tavi, “Mourning Cloak” (via ahuntersheart)
"Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. … Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them."
— Edwidge Danticat, “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work“ (via kassandramarriellee)
(Source: zombimatter, via fatsmartandpretty)
"A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared."
— Gloria Anzaldúa ”Speaking in Tongues” (via thugzmansion)
"But women have survived, and our feelings have survived. As poetry. And there are no new pains. We have felt them already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They lie in our dreams, they lie in our poems, and it is our dreams and our poems that point the way to our freedom."
— Audre Lorde, “Poetry Makes Something Happen”
"Poetry is not a luxury. For the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon those changes we hope to bring about through those lives. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dreams birth concepts, as feeling births ideas, as knowledge births or precedes understanding."
— Audre Lorde, “Poetry Makes Something Happen”
"My poetry is not separate from my living, nor is yours. The only way we can teach another person to create poetry is to teach that person how to feel herself or himself. The experience of poetry is intimate, and it is crucial. For that reason, of course, it is often resented or resisted. The pursuit of one’s own poetry is basically a subversive activity, because the pursuit of one’s feelings colors one’s total existence, and we are paid well for refusing to feel ourselves."
— Audre Lorde, “Poetry Makes Something Happen”
