Michel Leiris Quotes

“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 the aurora borealis unfurls its strange, cold spangles. Majesty does not tolerate other eyes than these hard crystals”
― Michel Leiris, Brisées

“Pessimism is a towering skyscraper eighty stories high in the suburbs of the soul at the end of a long avenue with waste ground on either side and a few poorly-stocked little shops. Several ultra-fast staircases give access to the building, running up from the cellars to the roof-gardens. The comfort of this place leaves nothing to be desired and only the greatest luxury is acceptable, but every Friday the residents gather on the ground floor to read from a bible bound in the skin of a blind man. The psalmic words they intone rise up through the pipes, sigh in the stoves and sweep the chimneys coated inside with black grease which leaves dirt on the skin. Water runs constantly in the bathrooms and the showers beat down on the numbered bodies, peppering them with sand. On Sundays the bed linen unrolls by itself and nobody makes love. For this tower block, like an obscure phallus scraping the vulva of the sky, is usually a hive of sexual activity. The most beautiful woman lives there, but no-one has ever known her. It is said, that dressed in furs and feathers, she keeps herself shut away in a first-floor apartment as if in a white safe. Her windows are scissors which cut short both shadow and breath. Her name is AURORA.”
― Michel Leiris, Aurora

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

“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 its game.”
― Michel Leiris, Brisées

“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 to cigar smoke when the North Star appears.”
― Michel Leiris, Brisées

“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, bare themselves, and show us by chance, for the space of a lightning bolt bony with dice, a few of our reasons for living and dying”
― Michel Leiris, Brisées