Michel Leiris Quotes & Sayings

Fascism: awful stench of saw and axe. — Michel Leiris

Eroticism releases, ever so slightly, great lightning flashes that, on occasion, reveal to us the true nature of a given organ, suddenly restoring both its whole reality and its hallucinatory force, while simultaneously installing as sovereign goddess the abolition of hierarchies- those hierarchies within which we habitually grade, for better or for worse, the different parts of the body. — Michel Leiris

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

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

I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure - like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel - can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us. — Michel Leiris

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

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

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

..the sense of a catastrophe perpetually invoked and avoided creates a rapture in whose depths horror and pleasure coincide... — Michel Leiris

poetry's favourite moment is when one loses one's footing because of a landslide or seismic shaking of thought — Michel Leiris

When the human voice is reduced to being no longer a song, a word, or a cry, but the articulation of the unnamable itself, it is natural that there should be no other sound than the grinding of ice in the polar regions, the light, intermittent crackling of silk in the highest zones of the atmosphere, at the moment when the aurora borealis unfurls its strange, cold spangles. Majesty does not tolerate other eyes than these hard crystals — Michel Leiris