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The Infinite Conversation QUOTES

The Infinite Conversation QUOTES

1 " Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back by laying bare; it does not comprehend (strictly speaking), it attends. A marvelous innocence. "

― Maurice Blanchot , The Infinite Conversation

2 " Something in the question necessarily exceeds the power of questioning; but this does not mean that there are too many secrets in the world that provoke questions: it is rather the contrary. When being is finally without question, when the whole becomes socially or institutionally realized, at that time and in an unbearable manner, the excess of questioning with respect to the power of questioning will make itself felt for the bearer of the question: the question will be felt as the impossibility of questioning. In the profound question, impossibility questions. "

― Maurice Blanchot , The Infinite Conversation

3 " Even death is a power, a capacity. It is not a simple event that will happen to me, an objective and observable fact; here my power to be will cease, here I will no longer be able to be here. But death, insofar as it belongs to me and belongs to me alone, since no one can die my death in my stead or in my place, makes of this non-possibility, this impending future of mine, this relation to myself always open until my end, yet another power. Dying, I can still die, this is our sign as man. "

― Maurice Blanchot , The Infinite Conversation

4 " We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer. "

― Maurice Blanchot , The Infinite Conversation

5 " What if what has been said one time not only does not cease to be said but always recommences, and not only recommences but also imposes upon us the idea that nothing has ever truly begun, having from the beginning begun by beginning again. "

― Maurice Blanchot , The Infinite Conversation