Edmond Jabes Quotes
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My hands are full when you give me your hand.
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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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The hand opens to the word, opens to distance.
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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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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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Within every word there is the unhealable wound of language.
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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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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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Does surviving mean living on life, living on a dead life, living death all life long?
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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.