25 Quotes by Edmond Jabès

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.

Does surviving mean living on life, living on a dead life, living death all life long?

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?

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

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

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.

[W]andering creates the desert.

«No adoptes esa idea errónea de que todo extranjero, porque exhibe su diferencia, es incapaz de ser solidario»

Hospitalière est, par-dessus tout, l’attente/ "Le ciel, de loin, est ciel. De près, il n’est plus rien"/ ... Incommensurable est l’hospitalité du livre.../ [...] « Tout livre s’écrit dans la transparence d’un adieu », disait-il. [...] « L’aurore n’est pas l’adieu – avait-il noté – ; mais tout adieu est l’éblouissante audace d’une aurore. »/ Demain est le coupable horizon [...]