Edmond Jabes Quotes & Sayings

the soul has words as petals — Edmond Jabes

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

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

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

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

[W]andering creates the desert. — Edmond Jabes

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

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

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

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

The hand opens to the word, opens to distance. — Edmond Jabes

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

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. — Edmond Jabes

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

A great love carries within it a mourning for love. — Edmond Jabes

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. — Edmond Jabes

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 Jabes

Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things. — Edmond Jabes

My hands are full when you give me your hand. — Edmond Jabes

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) — Edmond Jabes

By the light of our insistent truths we wander into death — Edmond Jabes

One rose is enough for the dawn — Edmond Jabes

Nothingness is a sigh of eternity, a casual avowal of the infinite — Edmond Jabes

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 Jabes

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 Jabes

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. — Edmond Jabes

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

Wound me ... I can only feed on my humiliated blood. — Edmond Jabes

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 Jabes

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

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