The Book of Margins Quotes

“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.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins

“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 lose 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.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins

“All invention flows from words. We are their tributaries. They mark us as strongly as we mark them. Words for joy. Words for unhappiness. Words for indifference and hope. Words for things and for men. Words for the universe and words for nothingness.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins

“Time is memory without object”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins