Edmond Jabès

It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it…

— Edmond Jabes

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

— Edmond Jabes

By the light of our insistent truths we wander into death

— Edmond Jabes

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

— Edmond Jabes

My hands are full when you give me your hand.

— Edmond Jabes

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

— Edmond Jabes

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

— Edmond Jabes

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

— Edmond Jabes

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

— Edmond Jabes

“In your loneliness, you hear the word from far away and then, in gratitude, look at it so closely that you cannot…

— Edmond Jabès

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

— Edmond Jabes

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

— Edmond Jabes

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

— Edmond Jabes

“At an early age I found myself facing the incomprehensible, the unthinkable, death. Ever since, I have known nothing on this earth…

— Edmond Jabès

As long as we are not chased from our words we have nothing to fear. As long as our utterances keep their…

— Edmond Jabes

THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of…

— Edmond Jabes

“We will gather images and images of images up till the last, which is blank. This one we will agree on. (Reb…

— Edmond Jabès

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

— Edmond Jabes

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

— Edmond Jabes

How could an argument soothe or settle a controversy when every word is a nest for a bird of doubt? (meaning of…

— Edmond Jabes

The soul has words as petals.

— Edmond Jabes

One rose is enough for the dawn

— Edmond Jabes

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

— Edmond Jabes

“When I talk to you I am happy. Because you listen, and my words find a home.”

— Edmond Jabès

I believe in the writer's mission. He receives it from the word, which carries its suffering and its hope within it. He…

— Edmond Jabes