Gabriel Josipovici Quotes & Sayings

We are in the interstices. In the intervals. We are that which moves between the spaces. Which conjures up the spaces. — Gabriel Josipovici

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 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

And again the feeling swept over her, taking hold of her body and shaking it so violently that in a moment she had forgotten everything else, could think only of this buffeting, this being hurled from side to side and up and down, the sense of helplesslness and loss, of the impossibility of speaking and the need to speak, if only she could find the thread, the way through, if only she could stand back and see when it all began, disentangle the memories, the events, she felt herself carried on a current, borne on the waves, if only she could stop if only she could hold on, tell it, tell it, do you understand what I'm saying it's just that there's too much for one person to say too much to have all that inside you it runs about in my head my body it needs an outlet it needs to find a way out [ ... ] — Gabriel Josipovici

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