The Book of Questions Quotes

“Does surviving mean living on life, living on a dead life, living death all life long?”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]

“Why these eyes without reading, but always ready to read? This mad will to be healed by the word when all sentences are only hiccups, shivers, sorry tics of the void?”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]

“In your loneliness, you hear the word from far away and then, in gratitude, look at it so closely that you cannot but drown in it.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]

“A great love carries within it a mourning for love.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]

“I have always felt a strange, vague presence near me: shadowy at night, a paler whiteness in the day, and changing shapes to the point of havingg none at the moments when I feared it most. Fascinated, I found myself at a crossroad; but in front of a hole. There, night and day did not know each other. I approached a death which did not know death because it had not known life, a death without dead, an orphaned life without lives, where nothing was ever other than nothing.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]

“I have always felt a strange, vague presence near me: shadowy at night, a paler whiteness in the day, and changing shapes to the point of having none at the moments when I feared it most. Fascinated, I found myself at a crossroad; but in front of a hole. There, night and day did not know each other. I approached a death which did not know death because it had not known life, a death without dead, an orphaned life without lives, where nothing was ever other than nothing.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]

“But this absence cannot be evoked. I have no life and never had one. I do not exist. I escape all that escapes me, escapes you, you who talk, who pursue me, who die.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]

“Dawn is more than a hope, it is an elect full of fresh fervor. Straining towards what is to come, his ties cut, man when he is finally free gorges himself on eternity. His gravity lies in being available and great, in the vacancy of a moment which will fuse with his life. Not to expect anything and yet to die daily of infinite expectation.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume II [IV. Yaël, V. Elya, VI. Aely, VII. El, Or the Last Book]