Gabriel Josipovici > Quotes

“I agree with Proust in this, he says, that books create their own silences in ways that friends rarely do. And the silence that grows palpable when one has finished a canto of Dante, he says, is quite different from the silence that grows palpable when one has reached the end of Oedipus at Colonus. The most terrible thing that has happened to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened of silence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out... the fear of silence is the fear of loneliness, he says, and the fear of loneliness is the fear of silence. People fear silence, he says, because they have lost the ability to trust the world to bring about renewal. Silence for them means only the recognition that they have been abandoned... How can people find the strength to be happy if they are so terrified of silence?”
― Gabriel Josipovici, Moo Pak

“I had always imagined, Westfield said, that one could either die tragically, cut short with much still to be done, or that one could die old and full of years, as the Bible has it, after having put one's house in order. I had never considered that there is a third alternative, in which one went on living and yet found no order in one's life, in which everything at the end was as confused and unfinished as it had always been.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, Goldberg: Variations: A Literary Tapestry Where Past, Present, Imagination, and Truth Intertwine

“I do not know where this mania for understanding oneself has come from, he said, but it clearly exerts a powerful hold on people.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, Moo Pak

“What Beckett is dramatising here is a quite different view of the notion that man is the storytelling animal. What he is showing is that we may indeed have an innate capacity to tell stories, but that far from this being the royal road to truth it is simply a way of avoiding the truth, of avoiding the sense that something nameless is taking its course, that our lives are passing us by, that we are moving inexorably towards a death we do not understand or want and certainly do not know how to cope with.

But what does that do to the feeling that something nameless is taking its course, something that needs to be dealt with that otherwise will drive him mad? This, it seems to me, is the paradox that lies at the heart of all modern art: the need to speak of that which cannot be uttered, together with the recognition that the utterance perverts or destroys the thing that needed to be spoken of.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, The Teller and the Tale: Essays on Literature and Culture

“As for his friends, he no longer had any. One after another they had all dropped away, as though friendship had become a burden which he had at first made every effort to shoulder and then had gradually realised that there was no need for and let go, and it had gone.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, Goldberg: Variations: A Literary Tapestry Where Past, Present, Imagination, and Truth Intertwine

“But there is, of course, no excuse. For it is not really his art but his life that he is talking about, and for one’s life not living up to expectation there is no excuse, except for the paltry one that this is true of everybody’s life.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, The Cemetery in Barnes

“We live in that grave, in those clothes, in the pressure between nothing and everything, we live by perpetual movement from place to place but we want oh we so much want to escape to say it all to come home at last to the right place our rightful place our rightful space. As if that was possible.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, Migrations

“We”
― Gabriel Josipovici, The Cemetery in Barnes

“Il avait abouti à la conclusion que, bien qu’il n’existe pas d’immortalité individuelle, nous vivons dans un sens dans les mémoires des autres”
― Gabriel Josipovici, Goldberg : Variations

“Perhaps we only imagine we deserve rhythms, once lived by rhythms, when all there ever was was moments. Separate. Distinct. Like beads on a string. Except that there is no string. Or the string has broken and the beads run about all over the floor.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, Contre-Jour: A triptych after Pierre Bonnard

“There is a kind of sorrow in solitude, he would say.The sweetnes and the sadness are conjoined. And Monteverdi is the artist of that mood. It is, he would say, the mood of our times, for however close we are to another human being we always know, deep down, that we are alone.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, The Cemetery in Barnes

“The worst way to read, he said, is with the thought that you do not have enough time. The only way to read is in the knowledge that there is an infinite amount of time stretching ahead, and that if one wishes to taste only afew sentences per day one is free to do so.”
― Gabriel Josipovici

“We are in the interstices. In the intervals. We are that which moves between the spaces. Which conjures up the spaces.”
― Gabriel Josipovici, Migrations