The Space of Literature Quotes

“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, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

“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, The Space of Literature

“Memory is freedom of the past. But what has no present will not accept the present of a memory either. Memory says of the event: it once was and now it will never be again. The irremediable character of what has no present, of what is not even there as having once been there, says: it never happened, never for a first time, and yet it starts over, again, again, infinitely. It is without end, without beginning. It is without a future.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

“Art is not religion, 'it doesn't even lead to religion.' But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

“Death, in the human perspective, is not a given, it must be achieved. It is a task, one which we take up actively, one which becomes the source of our activity and mastery. Man dies, that is nothing. But man is, starting from his death. He ties himself tight to his death with a tie of which he is the judge. He makes his death; he makes himself mortal and in this way gives himself the power of a maker and gives to what he makes its meaning and its truth. The decision to be without being is possibility itself: the possibility of death.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

“Kafka remarks, with surprise, with enchantment, that he has entered into literature as soon as he can substitute “He” for “I.” This is true, but the transformation is much more profound. The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace littéraire"

“To write is, moreover, to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power according to which, when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, the clear light of day that develops through tasks undertaken, through action and time.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace littéraire"

“The notion of characters, as the traditional form of the novel, is only one of the compromises by which the writer, drawn out of himself by literature in search of its essence, tries to salvage his relations with the world and himself.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace littéraire"

“Where he is, only being speaks—which means that language doesn’t speak any more, but is.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace littéraire"

“Memory is freedom of the past. But what has no present will not accept the present of
a memory either. Memory says of the event: it once was and now it will never be again. The irremediable character of what has no present, of what is not even there as having once been there, says: it never happened, never for a first time, and yet it starts over, again, again, infinitely. It is without end, without beginning. It is without a future.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

“Where I am alone, I am not there; no one is there, but the impersonal is: the outside, as that which prevents, precedes, and dissolves the possibility of any personal relation. Someone is the faceless third person, the They of which everybody and anybody is part, but who is part of it? Never anyone in particular, never you and I. Nobody is part of the They. “They” belongs to a region which cannot be brought to light, not because it hides some secret alien to any revelation or even because it is radically obscure, but because it transforms everything which has access to it, even light, into anonymous, impersonal being, the Nontrue, the Nonreal yet always there. The They is, in this respect, what appears up very close when someone dies.2”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace littéraire"

“Only time itself, during which negation becomes our power, permits the “unity of contraries.” In time’s absence what is new renews nothing; what is present is not contemporary; what is present presents nothing, but represents itself and belongs henceforth and always to return. It isn’t, but comes back again.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace littéraire"

“The journal represents the series of reference points which a writer establishes in order to keep track of himself when he begins to suspect the dangerous metamorphosis to which he is exposed. It is a route that remains viable; it is something like a watchman’s walkway upon ramparts: parallel to, overlooking, and sometimes skirting around the other path—the one where to stray is the endless task. Here true things are still spoken of.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace littéraire"

“Then literature has the glorious solitude of reason, that rarefied life at the heart of the whole which would require resolution and courage if this reason were not in fact the stability of an ordered aristocratic society; that is, the noble satisfaction of a part of society which concentrates the whole within itself by isolating itself well above what sustains it.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace littéraire"

“The tone is not the writer’s voice, but the intimacy of the silence he imposes upon the word. This implies that the silence is still his—what remains of him in the discretion that sets him aside. The tone makes great writers, but perhaps the work is indifferent to what makes them great.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace littéraire"

“the writer never reads his work. It is, for him, illegible, a secret. He cannot linger in its presence. It is a secret because he is separated from it. However, his inability to read the work is not a purely negative phenomenon. It is, rather, the writer’s only real relation to what we call the work.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace littéraire"

“The infinite nature of the work, seen thus, is just the mind’s infiniteness. The mind wants to fulfill itself in a single work, instead of realizing itself in an infinity of works and in history’s ongoing movement. But Valéry was by no means a hero. He found it good to talk about everything, to write on everything: thus the scattered totality of the world distracted him from the unique and rigorous totality of the work, from which he amiably let himself be diverted. The etc. hid behind the diversity of thoughts and subjects. However, the work—the work of art, the literary work—is neither finished nor unfinished: it is. What it says is exclusively this: that it is—and nothing more.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace littéraire"