The Book of Questions Quotes

“When I talk to you I am happy. Because you listen, and my words find a home.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“What escapes us tears us from ourselves and ruins us. I seek what cannot be sought. I am a miscarried void, the hollowest quest.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“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 Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“I have the impression of moving in the shadow of syllables, in regions before secrets, where language cannot yet answer the call of thought, in swamps where you risk sinking with every breath”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“The book […] does not open from left to right or from right to left, but from top to bottom: one page in the sky, one in the dust.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions

“He who lives within himself, beside his God, beside the life and death of God, lives in two adjoining rooms with a door between. He goes from one to the other in order to celebrate Him. He goes from presence in consciousness to presence in absence. He must fully be, before he can aspire to not being anymore, that is to say: to being more, to being all. For absence is All.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“I write by the light of what is not revealed in what I express. — Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book] trans.by Rosmarie Waldrop (Wesleyan University Press, 1983)”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“I write by the light of what is not revealed in what I express. — Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book], trans.by Rosmarie Waldrop (Wesleyan University Press, 1983)”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“The book is the work of the book. It is the sun, which gives birth to the sea. It is the sea, which reveals the earth. It is the earth, which shapes man. Otherwise sun, sea, earth, and man would be focused light without object, water moving without coming or going, wealth of sand without presence, a waiting of flesh and spirit without touch, having nothing that corresponds to it, having neither doubles or opposites.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“Not another word. God is speaking to me. I answer. Not another sound; silence listens to silence.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“Our limits save us. Being at the same time a thing, a thought, an image, allows us to show ourselves in full awareness. What escapes us tears us from ourselves and ruins us. I seek what cannot be sought. I am a miscarried void, the hollowest quest.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“I have accepted all separations, even the hardest which cut me off from myself whom I had just set out to find.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“Whether following a competent guide or left to our own instinct, we wander within ourselves (up to the point where we are still ourselves, but different) to find the obscure spot which hides the sun and which, we know, is that privileged place where dark and light touch in order to be two and still only one in revealing the universe.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

“God is absent. All presence is limited to itself.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]