I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity.
Maurice BlanchotWe 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 BlanchotThe disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experienceโit is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.
Maurice BlanchotLovers 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 BlanchotEvery artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimate relation. There is the mistake of Homer, of Shakespeare โ which is perhaps, for both, the fact of not existing. Every art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, every work is the implementation of this original fault, from which come to us a new light and a risky conception of plenitude.
Maurice Blanchot