Edmond Jabes Quotes

In the morning, you tear up the pages of your fever, but every word naturally leads you back to its color, its night.

[W]andering creates the desert.

Only what touches us closely preoccupies us. We prepare in solitude to face it. (The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion)

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.

the soul has words as petals

We will gather images and images of images up till the last, which is blank. This one we will agree on. (Reb Carasso)

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.

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.

For the writer, discovering the work he will write is both like a miracle
and a wound, like the miracle of the wound.

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

One wound is enough to feed the open wounds of the sky.

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.

We do not truly speak except at a distance. There is no word not severed.

The hand opens to the word, opens to distance.

One rose is enough for the dawn

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.

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.

Silence is no weakness of language.
It is, on the contrary, its strength.
It is the weakness of words not to know this.

It is not certainty which is creative, but the uncertainty we are pledged to in our works.

When I talk to you I am happy. Because you listen, and my words find a home.

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)