Michel-leiris Quote by Michel Leiris

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

— Michel Leiris

“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

“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

“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

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

— Michel Leiris

Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.

— Laura Elliott

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off…

— Jean Cocteau

You can be intuitive when you've got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just…

— Willem Dafoe

I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the…

— Alice Oswald

That's one of those questions that would just love to have a pat answer. You know, poetry's job is to make us feel good.…

— Sam Hamill

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soiled world.

— Walt Whitman

There are passages of the Bible that are soiled forever by the touches of the hands of ministers who delight in the cheap jokes…

— Phillips Brooks