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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One wound is enough to feed the open wounds of the sky.
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When I talk to you I am happy. Because you listen, and my words find a home.
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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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One rose is enough for the dawn.
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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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The soul has words as petals.
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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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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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We do not truly speak except at a distance. There is no word not severed.
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My hands are full when you give me your hand.
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Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.
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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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Wound me . . . I can only feed on my humiliated blood.
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Wandering creates the desert.
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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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The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.
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Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things.
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What is not grasped has all the chances to become real.
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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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Nothingness is a sigh of eternity, a casual avowal of the infinite.
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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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Every work cancels the dark. Every work is a hymn from the other side of memory to a memory that is spellbound. Beauty is death's gift to vulgar life so that it can live in beauty.
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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.