Top 26 Quotes & Sayings by Edmond Jabes

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

God, on the other side of my table, composes His book whose smoke envelops me: for the flame of my candle is His pen.

The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.

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

One rose is enough for the dawn

The soul has words as petals.

Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.

By the light of our insistent truths we wander into death

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.

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

The hand opens to the word, opens to distance.

To whom to speak when the other no longer is? The place is empty when emptiness occupies all of the place.

Ah, the sun will catch me, in my disturbing transparency. What am I but an awareness of the dark, forever?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things.

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)

My hands are full when you give me your hand.

What is not grasped has all the chances to become real.

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.

Wound me . . . I can only feed on my humiliated blood.

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