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… — Michel Leiris Copy Share Image
“..the sense of a catastrophe perpetually invoked and avoided creates a rapture in whose depths horror and pleasure coincide...” — Michel Leiris Copy Share Image
If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the… — Michel Leiris Copy Share Image
“Always beneath or above concrete events, I remain a prisoner of this alternative: the world as a real object that dominates me and devours me (like Judith) in suffering and in fear, or else the world as a pure fantasy which dissolves in my hands, which I destroy (like Lucrece thrusting home the dagger) without ever succeeding in possessing it.… — Michel Leiris Copy Share
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… — Michel Leiris Copy Share
“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… — Michel Leiris Copy Share Image
“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… — Michel Leiris Copy Share Image
“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… — Michel Leiris Copy Share
“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,… — Michel Leiris Copy Share Image
“poetry’s favourite moment is when one loses one’s footing because of a landslide or seismic shaking of thought” — Michel Leiris Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“Pessimism is a towering skyscraper eighty stories high in the suburbs of the soul at the end of a long avenue with waste ground… — Michel Leiris Copy Share Image
