Maurice Blanchot Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Maurice Blanchot
I wanted to see something in full daylight; I was sated with the pleasure and comfort of the half light; I had the same desire for the daylight as for water and air. And if seeing was fire, I required the plenitude of fire, and if seeing would infect me with madness, I madly wanted that madness.

Maurice Blanchot
To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.

Maurice Blanchot
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking.

Maurice Blanchot
But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.

Maurice Blanchot
If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.

Maurice Blanchot
Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought.

Maurice Blanchot
Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimacy. All art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, each work is the implementation of this original fault, from which comes a risky plenitude and new light.

Maurice Blanchot
The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.

Maurice Blanchot
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
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.

Maurice Blanchot
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.

Maurice Blanchot
The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth.

Maurice Blanchot
Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed)

Maurice Blanchot