“A Book,” p. p. 92
The Creator (2000), Sequence: “Nostalgic Elements”
“Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.”
“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
Variant: Open your eyes, the Frenchman on the radio used to say, and see what you can with them before they close forever.
Source: All the Light We Cannot See
Ashes and Snow : A Novel in Letters (2005) Flying Elephants Press
“Who has seen with their eyes open can see again, but with the eyes closed.”
Quien ha visto con los ojos abiertos, puede volver a ver, pero con los ojos cerrados.
Voces (1943)
Kafka on the Shore (2002)
“Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye.”
Variant translation: Close your bodily eye, that you may see your picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within.
Quoted in The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany (1996) by Fredrick Berwick and Jürgn Klein, and in "Culture: Caspar D. Friedrich and the Wasteland" by Gjermund E. Jansen in Bits of News (3 March 2005) http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/154/42/
undated
Context: Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards. A picture must not be invented but felt. Observe the form exactly, both the smallest and the large and do not separate the small from the large, but rather the trivial from the important.
