Henri Michaux Quotes

Only learn with reservations. An entire life is not enough to unlearn what you naively, submissively, have allowed to be placed in your head---innocent one---without imagiging the consequences.

He who knows how to shave the razor, will know how to erase the eraser.

He who has rejected his demons badgers us to death with his angels

It is preferable not to travel with a dead man.

He who doesn't know anger doesn't know anything. He doesn't know the immediate.

There is not one self. There are not ten selves. There is no self. ME is only a position in equilibrium. (One among a thousand others, continually possible and always at the ready.) An average of "me's," a movement in the crowd. In the name of many, I sign this book.

I do not know how to make poems

You can love a woman. To admire her is hard. You are not dealing with something important.

I AM ROWING (a hex poem)

i have cursed your forehead, your belly, your life
i have cursed the streets your steps plod through
the things your hands touch
i have cursed the inside of your dreams

i have placed a puddle in your eye so that you cant see anymore
an insect in your ear so that you cant hear anymore
a sponge in your brain so that you cant understand
anymore

i have frozen you in the soul of your body
iced you in the depths of your life
the air you breathe suffocates you
the air you breathe has the air of a cellar
is an air that has already been exhaled
been puffed out by hyenas

the dung of this air is something no one can breathe
your skin is damp all over
your skin sweats out waters of great fear
your armpits reak far and wide of the crypt

animals drop dead as you pass
dogs howl at night their heads raised toward your house
you cant run away
you cant muster the strength of an ant to the tip of your feet

your fatigue makes a lead stump in your body
your fatigue is a long caravan
your fatigue stretches out to the country of nan
your fatigue is inexpressible

your mouth bites you
your nails scratch you
no longer yours, your wife
no longer yours, your brother
the sole of his foot bitten by an angry snake

someone has slobbered on your descendents
someone has droo

The mere ambition to write a poem is enough to kill it.

At the age of eight, I still dreamed of being granted plant status.

The Sorbonne should be razed and Chris Marker put in its place.

On the edge of a tropical ocean, in a thousand reflections of the silver light of an invisible moon, among undulations of restless waters, ceaselessly changing ...
Among silent breakers, the tremors of the shining surface, in the swift flux and reflux martyrizing the patches of light, in the rendings of luminous loops and arcs, and lines, in the occultations and reappearances of dancing bursts of light being decomposed, recomposed, contracted, spread out, only to be re-distributed once more before me, with me, within me, drowned, and unendurably buffeted, my calm violated a thousand times by the tongues of infinity, oscillating, sinusoidally overrun by the multitude of liquid lines. enormous with a thousand folds, I was and I was not, I was caught, I was lost, I was in a state of complete ubiquity. The thousands upon thousands of rustlings were my own thousand shatterings.

He who hides his madman, dies voiceless.

It came to me late, as an adult, the desire to draw and participate in the world of lines.

I put an apple on my table. Then I put myself inside this apple. What tranquility!

Base yourself on what you feel, even when you alone feel it.