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Michel Leiris Quotes

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

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
Love, Dream, Eye
Michel Leiris (1987). “Nights as day, days as night”, Rizzoli Intl Pubns

Fascism: awful stench of saw and axe.

Michel Leiris
Awful, Saws, Fascism

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
Writing, Doe, Steel
Michel Leiris, Richard Howard (1992). “Manhood: A Journey from Childhood Into the Fierce Order of Virility”, p.105, University of Chicago Press

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
Museums, Quality, Frozen
Michel Leiris, Richard Howard (1992). “Manhood: A Journey from Childhood Into the Fierce Order of Virility”, p.30, University of Chicago Press

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