Edmond Jabes Quotes
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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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Within every word there is the unhealable wound of language.
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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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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.
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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)
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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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A great love carries within it a mourning for love.
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For the writer, discovering the work he will write is both like a miracle and a wound, like the miracle of the wound.
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By the light of our insistent truths we wander into death.
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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.
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I have the impression of moving in the shadow of syllables, in regions before secrets, where language cannot yet answer the call of thought, in swamps where you risk sinking with every breath.
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Does surviving mean living on life, living on a dead life, living death all life long?
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Ah, the sun will catch me, in my disturbing transparency. What am I but an awareness of the dark, forever?
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To whom to speak when the other no longer is? The place is empty when emptiness occupies all of the place.
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Why these eyes without reading, but always ready to read? This mad will to be healed by the word when all sentences are only hiccups, shivers, sorry tics of the void?
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In the morning, you tear up the pages of your fever, but every word naturally leads you back to its color, its night.