When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster. Maurice Blanchot
Some Similar Quotes
  1. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. - Friedrich Nietzsche

  2. My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness. - Unknown

  3. Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish'd and cured is that the lunacy is soordinary that the whippers are in love too. - William Shakespeare

  4. He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arm out wide. "I will go mad! " he annouced. - Douglas Adams

  5. Too much sanity may be madness – and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be! - Dale Wasserman

More Quotes By Maurice Blanchot
  1. 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...

  2. Reading is ignorant. It begins with what it reads and in this way discovers the force of a beginning. It is receiving and hearing, not the power to decipher and analyze, to go beyond by developing or to go back by laying bare; it does...

  3. Why are those who knew him, when they pass from the memory of a young man, sensitive and gay, to the work — novels and writings — surprised to pass into a nocturnal world, a world of cold torment, a world not without light but...

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

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