Michel Leiris Quotes

#1. poetry's favourite moment is when one loses one's footing because of a landslide or seismic shaking of thought

Michel Leiris

#2. at man's height the mouth utters its cries, tosses forth its oracles, gives vent to its puns. To allow words to come to life, bare themselves, and show us by chance, for the space of a lightning bolt bony with dice, a few of our reasons for living and dying

Michel Leiris

#3. Midway between the too soiled ground and the too-sublime vaults, at the level of the air, entering the skin of the role, poetry plays its game.

Michel Leiris

#4. And the beautiful lady, still with her beautiful wasp's waist, the very beautiful lady whose charms buzz around our childish dreams, will not turn to cigar smoke when the North Star appears.

Michel Leiris

#5. ..the sense of a catastrophe perpetually invoked and avoided creates a rapture in whose depths horror and pleasure coincide...

Michel Leiris

#6. Nothing seems more like a whorehouse to me than a museum. In it you find the same equivocal aspect, the same frozen quality.

Michel Leiris

#7. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream-a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows-is essentially poetry.

Michel Leiris

#8. Fascism: awful stench of saw and axe.

Michel Leiris