Quotations From MAURICE BLANCHOT

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• 1.

  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.

  Maurice Blanchot (b. 1907), French literary theorist, author. "The Essential Solitude," ch. 1, The Space of Literature (1955, trans. 1982).
  
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• 2.

  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 alive and real, and not dying and without truth.

  Maurice Blanchot (b. 1907), French literary theorist, author. repr. In The Gaze of Orpheus, and Other Literary Essays, ed. P. Adams Sitney (1981). "The Essential Solitude," The Space of Literature (1955).
  
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• 3.

  Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud.

  Maurice Blanchot (b. 1907), French literary theorist, author. repr. In The Gaze of Orpheus, and Other Literary Essays, ed. P. Adams Sitney (1981). "Reading," The Space of Literature (1955).
  
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• 4.

  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 (b. 1907), French literary theorist, author. repr. In The Gaze of Orpheus, ed. P. Adams Sitney (1981). "The Essential Solitude," The Space of Literature (1955).
  
  Read more quotations about / on: work