47 Quotes by Maurice Blanchot

Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing more definitely than one disappears in the tomb.

The feeling of the uselessness of what I am doing is linked to this other feeling that nothing is more serious.

I would prefer not to: this sentence speaks in the intimacy of our nights: negative preference, the negation that effaces preference and is effaced therein: the neutrality of that which is not among the things there are to do.

Attendre, se rendre attentif à ce qui fait de l'attente un acte neutre, enroulé sur soi, serré en cercles dont le plus intérieur et le plus extérieur coïncident, attention distraite en attente et jusqu'à l'inattendu. Attente, attente qui est le refus de rien attendre, calme étendue déroulée par les pas.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.