Top 31 Maurice Blanchot Quotes
#1. 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 for the daylight as for water and air. And if seeing was fire, I required the plenitude of fire, and if seeing would infect me with madness, I madly wanted that madness.
Maurice Blanchot
#2. 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 is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth.
Maurice Blanchot
#3. If the sculptor uses stone and if the road builder also uses stone, the first uses it in a way that it is not used, consumed, negated by usage, but affirmed, revealed in its obscurity, as a road that leads only to itself.
Maurice Blanchot
#4. To name the cat is, if you like, to make it into a non-cat, a cat that has ceased to exist, has ceased to be a living cat, but this does not mean one is making it into a dog, or even a non-dog.
Maurice Blanchot
#5. At the moment everything was being destroyed she had created that which was most difficult: she had not drawn something out of nothing (a meaningless act), but given to nothing, in its form of nothing, the form of something.
Maurice Blanchot
#6. 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.
Maurice Blanchot
#7. 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, because he is separated from it.
Maurice Blanchot
#8. 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
#9. One thing must be understood : I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it.
Maurice Blanchot
#10. The feeling of the uselessness of what I am doing is linked to this other feeling that nothing is more serious.
Maurice Blanchot
#11. The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.
Maurice Blanchot
#12. To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.
Maurice Blanchot
#13. 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 remain hidden, only showing it, in the end, by dissimulation.
Maurice Blanchot
#14. But this is the rule, and there is no way to free oneself of it: as soon as the thought has arisen, it must be followed to the very end.
Maurice Blanchot
#15. But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.
Maurice Blanchot
#16. They who were so important, who wanted to create the world, are dumbfounded; everything crumbles.
Maurice Blanchot
#19. 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 is the implementation of this original fault, from which comes a risky plenitude and new light.
Maurice Blanchot
#21. Whoever digs at verse must renounce all idols; he has to break with everything.
He cannot have truth for his horizon, or the future as his element, for he has no right to hope. He
has, on the contrary, to despair. Whoever delves into verse dies; he encounters his death as an
abyss.
Maurice Blanchot
#22. Thought, infinitesimal thought, calm thought, pain.
Later, he asked himself how he had entered the calm. He couldn't talk about it with himself. Only joy at feeling he was in harmony with the words: Later, he ...
Maurice Blanchot
#23. The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.
Maurice Blanchot
#24. The disaster ... is what escapes the very possibility of experience - it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.
Maurice Blanchot
#25. To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.
Maurice Blanchot
#26. The anonymous puts the name in place, leaves it empty, as if the name were there only to let itself be passed through because the name does not name, but is the non-unity and non-presence of the nameless.
Maurice Blanchot
#27. The authentic answer is always the question's vitality. It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open.
Maurice Blanchot
#28. 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 itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought.
Maurice Blanchot
#29. Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing more definitely than one disappears in the tomb.
Maurice Blanchot
#30. If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.
Maurice Blanchot
#31. Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed)
Maurice Blanchot
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