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 surrounded by shadows-is essentially poetry.

  Michel Leiris

  Love, Dream, Eye

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

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• Fascism: awful stench of saw and axe.

  Michel Leiris

  Awful, Saws, Fascism

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• 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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• 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

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