from "The School of the Dead" by Helene Cixous

Writing is this complex activity, "this learning to die," that is, not to kill, knowing there is death, not denying it and not proclaiming it...Our crime isn't what we think, it isn't the crime in the newspapers, it's always a bit less and a bit more. In life, as soon as I say my, as soon as I say my daughter, my brother, I am verging on a form of murder, as soon as I forget to unceasingly recognize the other's difference. You may come to know your son, your sister, your daughter well after thirty, forty, or fifty years of life, and yet during those thirty or forty years you haven't known this person who was so close. You kept him or her in the realm of the dead. And the other way around. Then the one who dies kills and the one who doesn't die when the other dies kills as well. Surviving is not what we think...