Quotes from Maurice Blanchot

The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

How not to search that space where, for a time span lasting from dusk to dawn, two beings have no other reason to exist than to expose themselves totally to each other- totally, integrally, absolutely- so that their common solitude may appear not in front of their own eyes but in front of ours, yes, how not to look there and how not to rediscover "the negative community, the community of those who have no community"?

My sense of touch was floating six feet away from me; if anyone entered my room, I would cry out, but the knife was serenely cutting me up. Yes, I became a skeleton. At night my thinness would rise up before me to terrify me. As it came and went it insulted me, it tired me out; oh, I was certainly very tired.

To name the cat is, if you like, to make it into a non-cat, a cat that has ceased to exist, has ceased to be a living cat, but this does not mean one is making it into a dog, or even a non-dog.

The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

The authentic answer is always the question's vitality. It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open.

If the sculptor uses stone and if the road builder also uses stone, the first uses it in a way that it is not used, consumed, negated by usage, but affirmed, revealed in its obscurity, as a road that leads only to itself.

Attendre, c'était attendre l'occasion. Et l'occasion ne venait qu'à l'instant dérobé à l'attente, l'instant où il n'est plus question d'attendre.

Between them, the fear, the fear shared in common, and, through the fear, the abyss of fear over which they join one another without being able to do so, dying, each alone, of fear.

Whoever digs at verse must renounce all idols; he has to break with everything. He cannot have truth for his horizon, or the future as his element, for he has no right to hope. He has, on the contrary, to despair. Whoever delves into verse dies; he encounters his death as an abyss.

Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back by laying bare; it does not comprehend (strictly speaking), it attends. A marvelous innocence.

What does it remember? Itself, death as memory. An immense memory in which one dies. First to forget. To remember only where one remembers nothing. To forget: to remember everything as though by way of forgetting. There is a profoundly forgotten point from which every memory radiates. Everything is exalted in memory from something which is forgotten, an infinitesimal detail, a minuscule fissure into which it passes in its entirety.

We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer.

What if what has been said one time not only does not cease to be said but always recommences, and not only recommences but also imposes upon us the idea that nothing has ever truly begun, having from the beginning begun by beginning again.

I would prefer not to: this sentence speaks in the intimacy of our nights: negative preference, the negation that effaces preference and is effaced therein: the neutrality of that which is not among the things there are to do.

Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last - possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.

La pression de la ville : de toutes parts. Les maisons ne sont pas là pour qu'on y demeure, mais pour qu'il y ait des rues et, dans les rues, le mouvement incessant de la ville.

Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing more definitely than one disappears in the tomb.

The awareness at each moment of what is intolerable in the world (tortures, oppression, unhappiness, hunger, the camps) is not tolerable: it bends, sinks, and he who exposes himself to it sinks with it. The awareness is not awareness in general. All knowledge of what everywhere is intolerable will at once lead knowledge astray. We live thus between straying and a half-sleep. To know this is already enough to stray.

I feel myself dead – no; I feel myself, living, infinitely more dead than dead.

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.

One thing must be understood : I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it.

They who were so important, who wanted to create the world, are dumbfounded; everything crumbles.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.