Edmond Jabes Quotes
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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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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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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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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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A great love carries within it a mourning for love.
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The hand opens to the word, opens to distance.
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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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Within every word there is the unhealable wound of language.
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By the light of our insistent truths we wander into death.
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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.
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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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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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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.