Top 35 Maurice Blanchot Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A story? No. No stories, never again.”

— Maurice Blanchot

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

2. “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

3. “The less manifest the work, the stronger: as though a secret law demanded it always be hidden in what it shows, thus showing what must remain hidden, only showing it, in the end, by dissimulation.”

— Maurice Blanchot

4. “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.”

— Maurice Blanchot

5. “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

6. “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

7. “To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.”

— Maurice Blanchot

8. “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

9. “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

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

— Maurice Blanchot

11. “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.”

— Maurice Blanchot

12. “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

13. “A writer who writes, ″I am alone″... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.”

— Maurice Blanchot

14. “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

15. “Art is not religion, ‘it doesn’t even lead to religion.’ But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.”

— Maurice Blanchot

16. “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.”

— Maurice Blanchot

17. “I am not and I endure. An inexorable future stretches forth infinitely for this suppressed being. Hope turns in fear against time which drags it forward. All feelings gush out of themselves and come together, destroyed, abolished, in this feeling which molds me, makes me and unmakes me, causes me to feel, hideously, in a total absence of feeling, my reality in the shape of nothingness.”

— Maurice Blanchot

18. “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

19. “Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.”

— Maurice Blanchot

20. “The anonymous puts the name in place, leaves it empty, as if the name were there only to let itself be passed through because the name does not name, but is the non-unity and non-presence of the nameless.”

— Maurice Blanchot

21. “If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.”

— Maurice Blanchot

22. “The feeling of the uselessness of what I am doing is linked to this other feeling that nothing is more serious.”

— Maurice Blanchot

23. “The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.”

— Maurice Blanchot

24. “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.”

— Maurice Blanchot

25. “Memory is freedom of the past. But what has no present will not accept the present of a memory either. Memory says of the event: it once was and now it will never be again. The irremediable character of what has no present, of what is not even there as having once been there, says: it never happened, never for a first time, and yet it starts over, again, again, infinitely. It is without end, without beginning. It is without a future.”

— Maurice Blanchot

26. “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.”

— Maurice Blanchot

27. “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.”

— Maurice Blanchot

28. “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

29. “He would never know what he knew. That was loneliness.”

— Maurice Blanchot

30. “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.”

— Maurice Blanchot

31. “I call disaster what does not have the last limit: that which drags the last in the disaster.”

— Maurice Blanchot

32. “Whoever wants to remember himself must entrust himself to forgetfulness, to the risk that absolute forgetfulness is, and the beautiful chance that memory then becomes.”

— Maurice Blanchot

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

— Maurice Blanchot

34. “Kafka remarks, with surprise, with enchantment, that he has entered into literature as soon as he can substitute “He” for “I.” This is true, but the transformation is much more profound. The writer belongs to a language which no one speaks, which is addressed to no one, which has no center, and which reveals nothing.”

— Maurice Blanchot

35. “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.”

— Maurice Blanchot

36. “Where he is, only being speaks – which means that language doesn’t speak any more, but is.”

— Maurice Blanchot

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

— Maurice Blanchot

38. “The notion of characters, as the traditional form of the novel, is only one of the compromises by which the writer, drawn out of himself by literature in search of its essence, tries to salvage his relations with the world and himself.”

— Maurice Blanchot