Edmond Jabes Quotes
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Only what touches us closely preoccupies us. We prepare in solitude to face it. (The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion)
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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.
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We do not truly speak except at a distance. There is no word not severed.
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The book does not open from left to right or from right to left, but from top to bottom: one page in the sky, one in the dust.
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The soul has words as petals.
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One rose is enough for the dawn.
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One wound is enough to feed the open wounds of the sky.
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Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.
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The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.
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God, on the other side of my table, composes His book whose smoke envelops me: for the flame of my candle is His pen.
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At an early age I found myself facing the incomprehensible, the unthinkable, death. Ever since, I have known nothing on this earth can be shared because we own nothing. There is a word inside us stronger than all others - and more personal. A word of solitude and certainty, so buried in its night that it is barely audible to itself. A word of refusal, but also of absolute commitment, forging its bonds of silence in the emfathomable silence of the bond. This word cannot be shared. Only sacrificed.
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What escapes us tears us from ourselves and ruins us. I seek what cannot be sought. I am a miscarried void, the hollowest quest.
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We will gather images and images of images up till the last, which is blank. This one we will agree on.
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Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things.
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As long as we are not chased from our words we have nothing to fear. As long as our utterances keep their sound we have a voice. As long as our words keep their sense we have a soul.
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Nothingness is a sigh of eternity, a casual avowal of the infinite.
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What is not grasped has all the chances to become real.
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Wound me . . . I can only feed on my humiliated blood.
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It is not certainty which is creative, but the uncertainty we are pledged to in our works.
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In your loneliness, you hear the word from far away and then, in gratitude, look at it so closely that you cannot but drown in it.
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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.
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Within every word there is the unhealable wound of language.
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Silence is no weakness of language. It is, on the contrary, its strength. It is the weakness of words not to know this.
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The hand opens to the word, opens to distance.