We think not the distant, but the close that measures it

We believe that we think the strange and the foreign, but in reality we never think anything but the familiar; we think not the distant, but the close that measures it. And so again, when we speak of impossibility, it is possibility alone that, providing it with a reference, already sarcastically brings impossibility under its rule.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 44