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1 " 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
2 " 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]
3 " Only what touches us closely preoccupies us. We prepare in solitude to face it. (The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion) "
― Edmond Jabès
4 " «No adoptes esa idea errónea de que todo extranjero, porque exhibe su diferencia, es incapaz de ser solidario» "
― Edmond Jabès , A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book
5 " La nada es un suspiro de eternidad, una confesión casual del infinito. "
6 " [W]andering creates the desert. "
7 " 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. "
8 " 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. "
9 " Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things. "
10 " When I talk to you I am happy. Because you listen, and my words find a home. "
11 " We will gather images and images of images up till the last, which is blank. This one we will agree on. (Reb Carasso) "
12 " The hand opens to the word, opens to distance. "
13 " the soul has words as petals "
14 " What is not grasped has all the chances to become real. "
15 " What escapes us tears us from ourselves and ruins us. I seek what cannot be sought. I am a miscarried void, the hollowest quest. "
16 " 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. Yael, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]
17 " Within every word [there is] the unhealable wound of language. "
― Edmond Jabès , From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader
18 " 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? "
19 " 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. "
20 " In the morning, you tear up the pages of your fever, but every word naturally leads you back to its color, its night. "
