Michel Leiris

Fascism: awful stench of saw and axe.

— Michel Leiris

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

— Michel Leiris

If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery…

— Michel Leiris

“Always beneath or above concrete events, I remain a prisoner of this alternative: the world as a real object that dominates me…

— Michel Leiris

I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure -…

— 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,…

— 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…

— Michel Leiris

“When the human voice is reduced to being no longer a song, a word, or a cry, but the articulation of the…

— 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…

— Michel Leiris

“poetry’s favourite moment is when one loses one’s footing because of a landslide or seismic shaking of thought”

— Michel Leiris

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

— Michel Leiris

“Pessimism is a towering skyscraper eighty stories high in the suburbs of the soul at the end of a long avenue with…

— Michel Leiris

“…It was this white garment of mourning which he still wore, the white mourning of surgical gowns so much more significant than…

— Michel Leiris