Edmond Jabes Quotes

#1. the soul has words as petals

Edmond Jabes

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

Edmond Jabes

#3. 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.

Edmond Jabes

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

Edmond Jabes

#5. [W]andering creates the desert.

Edmond Jabes

#6. By the light of our insistent truths we wander into death

Edmond Jabes

#7. Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things.

Edmond Jabes

#8. I believe in the writer's mission. He receives it from the word, which carries its suffering and its hope within it. He questions the words, which question him. He accompanies the words, which accompany him. The initiative is shared, as if spontaneous.

Edmond Jabes

#9. 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 Jabes

#10. We will gather images and images of images up till the last, which is blank. This one we will agree on. (Reb Carasso)

Edmond Jabes

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

Edmond Jabes

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

Edmond Jabes

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

Edmond Jabes

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

Edmond Jabes

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

Edmond Jabes

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

Edmond Jabes

#17. A great love carries within it a mourning for love.

Edmond Jabes

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

Edmond Jabes

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

Edmond Jabes

#20. 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)

Edmond Jabes

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

Edmond Jabes

#22. The hand opens to the word, opens to distance.

Edmond Jabes

#23. My hands are full when you give me your hand.

Edmond Jabes

#24. Nothingness is a sigh of eternity, a casual avowal of the infinite

Edmond Jabes

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

Edmond Jabes

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

Edmond Jabes

#27. One rose is enough for the dawn

Edmond Jabes