Edmond Jabes famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Ears #Invisibility
My hands are full when you give me your hand.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Hands #Giving
One wound is enough to feed the open wounds of the sky.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Sky #Enough #Wounds
Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Country #Use #Poet
THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come. Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading. The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Book #Reading #Writing
How could an argument soothe or settle a controversy when every word is a nest for a bird of doubt? (meaning of words as inferences)
-- Edmond Jabes

#Bird #Doubt #Nests
We do not truly speak except at a distance. There is no word not severed.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Distance #Numbness #Emptiness
The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Book #Writing #Unbearable
God, on the other side of my table, composes His book whose smoke envelops me: for the flame of my candle is His pen.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Book #Flames #Burning
It is not certainty which is creative, but the uncertainty we are pledged to in our works.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Creativity #Creative #Certainty
I believe in the writer's mission. He receives it from the word, which carries its suffering and its hope within it. He questions the words, which question him. He accompanies the words, which accompany him. The initiative is shared, as if spontaneous.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Believe #Suffering #Purpose
The soul has words as petals.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Soul #Petals
WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish. There is my desert.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Book #Reading #Writing
For the writer, discovering the work he will write is both like a miracle and a wound, like the miracle of the wound.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Writing #Miracle #Discovering
The hand opens to the word, opens to distance.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Distance #Hands
Only what touches us closely preoccupies us. We prepare in solitude to face it. (The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion)
-- Edmond Jabes

#Book #Solitude #Littles
What is not grasped has all the chances to become real.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Real #Chance
Ah, the sun will catch me, in my disturbing transparency. What am I but an awareness of the dark, forever?
-- Edmond Jabes

#Dark #Forever #Sun
In the morning, you tear up the pages of your fever, but every word naturally leads you back to its color, its night.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Morning #Night #Color
Silence is no weakness of language. It is, on the contrary, its strength. It is the weakness of words not to know this.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Silence #Weakness #Language
Wound me . . . I can only feed on my humiliated blood.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Blood #Humiliated #Wounds
To whom to speak when the other no longer is? The place is empty when emptiness occupies all of the place.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Emptiness #Speak #Empty
By the light of our insistent truths we wander into death
-- Edmond Jabes

#Light #Wander
One rose is enough for the dawn
-- Edmond Jabes

#Beauty #Rose #Dawn
It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to loses it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.
-- Edmond Jabes

#Real #Journey #Silence

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