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Edmond Jabes Biography

Edmond Jabès (French: [ʒabɛs]; Hebrew: אדמון ז'אבס‎, Arabic: إدمون جابيس‎; Cairo, April 16, 1912 – Paris, January 2, 1991) was a French writer and poet of an Egyptian origin, and one of the best known literary figures to write in French after World War II. The work he produced when living in France in the late 1950s until his death in 1991 is highly original in its form and its breadth.

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Edmond Jabes Quotes

My hands are full when you give me your hand.

Full, Give Me, Giving, Hand, Hands

God, on the other side of my table, composes His book whose smoke envelops me: for the flame of my candle is His pen.

Book, Burning, Candle, Composes, Flame, Flames

Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.

Country, Use, Poet, Interpreter, Foreign

By the light of our insistent truths we wander into death

Death, Insistent, Light, Truths, Wander

What is not grasped has all the chances to become real.

Become, Chance, Chances, Grasped, Real

We do not truly speak except at a distance. There is no word not severed.

Distance, Emptiness, Numbness, Severed, Speak, Word

Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things.

Ear, Ears, Enter, Invisibility, Things

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.

Book, Come, Read, Reading, Write, Writing

Only what touches us closely preoccupies us. We prepare in solitude to face it. (The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion)

Book, Solitude, Littles, Prepare, Face

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.

Death, Journey, Real, Silent, Speak, Terrible

How could an argument soothe or settle a controversy when every word is a nest for a bird of doubt? (meaning of words as inferences)

Bird, Doubt, Meaning, Nest, Nests, Settle

Ah, the sun will catch me, in my disturbing transparency. What am I but an awareness of the dark, forever?

Catch, Dark, Disturbing, Forever, Sun

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.

Book, Eye, Margin, Pen, Reading, Separates

The hand opens to the word, opens to distance.

Distance, Hand, Hands, Opens, Word

The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.

Book, Facets, Unbearable, Writing

One wound is enough to feed the open wounds of the sky.

Enough, Open, Sky, Wounds

In the morning, you tear up the pages of your fever, but every word naturally leads you back to its color, its night.

Color, Morning, Night, Pages, Word

For the writer, discovering the work he will write is both like a miracle and a wound, like the miracle of the wound.

Discovering, Miracle, Write, Writer, Writing