Edmond Jabes Quotes

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)

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

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

One rose is enough for the dawn

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

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

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

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

My hands are full when you give me your hand.

The soul has words as petals.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

By the light of our insistent truths we wander into death

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

The hand opens to the word, opens to distance.