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Edmond Jabes Books

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“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.”

IfsBelievePurposeSufferingI BelieveI Believe InMissionsCarrieInitiativeSpontaneousAccompany
Book:The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Questions, The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book]
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“It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to loses it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.”

RealHardHappensDeathSpeakLosesSilenceJourneyIdentityPersonalityTerribleApproachSilentExtraordinaryDesertVoidSilence IsSilence Speaks
Author:Edmond Jabes
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“WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish. There is my desert.”

WritingBookHandsEyeTurnsReadingSpaceWhiteWrittenShapesPagesInfiniteWideDesertPensNeverthelessSheetsTransparentFind MeMarginsInfinite SpaceBlanche
Author:Edmond Jabes
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“THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come. Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading. The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.”

IfsWritingBookUseReadingProcessWrittenAimOneselfBackgroundsUnbearableTotalityFacetsPadsLaunching
Author:Edmond Jabes
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