Maurice Blanchot Quotes

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Maybe nothingness is to be without your presence, without you moving, slicing the noon like a blue flower, without you walking later through the fog and the cobbles, without the light you carry in your hand, golden, which maybe others will not see, which maybe no one knew was growing like the red beginnings of a rose. In short, without your presence: without your coming suddenly, incitingly, to know my life, gust of a rosebush, wheat of wind: since then I am because you are, since then you are, I am, we are, and through love I will be, you will be, we will be.

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.

Relationship is a mirror in which you can see yourself, not as you would wish to be, but as you are.

The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves

I sometimes write as if I were talking to myself, or to a mirror, or to someone for the last time. There's this element of confrontation.

Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing.

... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?

If you want to know what you look like, look into a mirror. If you want to know how you think, you should write

What does a mirror look at?

Greece is like a mirror. It makes you suffer. Then you learn.' To live alone?' To live. With what you are.

I think movies probably are a mirror in some way so we can see ourselves in them.

An object dies when the gaze that lights on it has disappeared.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

A poem, a sentence, causes us to see ourselves. I be, and I see my being, at the same time.

The Universe is a mirror of consciousness.

What are we when we are alone? Some, when they are alone, cease to exist.

Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself - to be is to be related.

From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.

Man is but the place where I stand.

Death is the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all.

Important thing is not the me that's lying here, but the me that's sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that's downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I'm not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family.

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.

Look directly into every mirror. Realize our reflection is the first sentence to a story, and our story starts: We were here.