Maurice Blanchot Quotes

21 quotes in 446 categories

• Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud.
• To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I…
• But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.
• A story? No. No stories, never again.
• I wanted to see something in full daylight; I was sated with the pleasure and comfort of the half light; I had the same desire…
• To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.
• Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks…
• The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.
• A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret,…
• The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.
• Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed)
• The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he…
• The less manifest the work, the stronger: as though a secret law demanded it always be hidden in what it shows, thus showing what must…
• There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that,…
• A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a…
• Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.
• If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.
• Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimacy. All art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, each work…
• I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light,…
• My being subsists only from a supreme point of view which is precisely incompatible with my point of view. The perspective in which I fade…

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