Edmond Jabès > Quotes

“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.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins

“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 lose 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.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins

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

“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.”
― Edmond Jabès

“Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things.”
― Edmond Jab

“The road which leads me to you is safe even when it runs into oceans.”
― Edmond Jabès, Le Livre des questions

“Within every word [there is] the unhealable wound of language.”
― Edmond Jabès, From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader

“When I talk to you I am happy. Because you listen, and my words find a home.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“the soul has words as petals”
― edmond jabes

“The hand opens to the word, opens to distance.”
― Edmond Jabès

“What is not grasped has all the chances to become real.”
― edmond jabes

“Does surviving mean living on life, living on a dead life, living death all life long?”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]

“What escapes us tears us from ourselves and ruins us. I seek what cannot be sought. I am a miscarried void, the hollowest quest.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“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.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

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

“[W]andering creates the desert.”
― Edmond Jabès

“In the morning, you tear up the pages of your fever, but every word naturally leads you back to its color, its night.”
― Edmond Jabès, From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader

“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?”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]

“In your loneliness, you hear the word from far away and then, in gratitude, look at it so closely that you cannot but drown in it.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]

“Nothingness is a sigh of eternity, a casual avowal of the infinite”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Resemblances

“A great love carries within it a mourning for love.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]

“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”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“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.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions

“As long as we are not chased from our words we have nothing to fear. As long as our utterances can be heard we have a voice. As long as our words keep their meaning we have a soul.”
― Edmond Jabès

“He who lives within himself, beside his God, beside the life and death of God, lives in two adjoining rooms with a door between. He goes from one to the other in order to celebrate Him. He goes from presence in consciousness to presence in absence. He must fully be, before he can aspire to not being anymore, that is to say: to being more, to being all. For absence is All.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“I write by the light of what is not revealed in what I express. — Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book], trans.by Rosmarie Waldrop (Wesleyan University Press, 1983)”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“Nothing can chain the light.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Shares

“I have always felt a strange, vague presence near me: shadowy at night, a paler whiteness in the day, and changing shapes to the point of havingg none at the moments when I feared it most. Fascinated, I found myself at a crossroad; but in front of a hole. There, night and day did not know each other. I approached a death which did not know death because it had not known life, a death without dead, an orphaned life without lives, where nothing was ever other than nothing.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]

“I write by the light of what is not revealed in what I express. — Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book] trans.by Rosmarie Waldrop (Wesleyan University Press, 1983)”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“VAAT EDİLMİŞ BİR TOPRAĞA ŞARKI

Ay kumdan bir şapkadır diyor ve ayı çiğneyip geçiyor. Duyulmamış öfkeleri vardır delilerin. Yıldızlar tuz yığınlarıdır diyor ve yemeğini iki kere tuzluyor. Deliler sihir ustasıdır. Senin saçında uyurken buldum bu şarkıyı. Beni nerede unutuyorsun, görmüyorum artık. Ellerimizle bir eşarp yapacağını da söylüyor, ama yalan söylüyor.”

sayfa 55”
― Edmond Jabès, Öcü'nün Yemeğine Şarkılar