Scratches Quotes

“Because for the writer, this is the whole point: to transmit into the head or heart of another person the concretions that have been deposited by his present or past life in the depths of his own head or heart and that have had value only for him until then; to communicate something in order to make it more valuable, to let it circulate, so that once it has been cast out to others it will come back to him a little more magical...”
― Michel Leiris, Scratches

“one another, find themselves washed by various different currents, and see their straight lines change into the flat trajectories of bullets, their curves into skids, their closed lines into the flights of boomerangs out and back or the paths of circuits, this is the fault of the spectator alone—craving metaphorical equivalences, or perhaps just learning to read—who projects onto the printed characters a flood of forces that is his alone but is nevertheless enough to give life to these depthless signs locked in a two-dimensional typographical world. On the one hand,”
― Michel Leiris, Scratches: The Rules of the Game, Volume 1

“The alphabet always remains obediently embedded in the white page, and if it should happen that the letters come to life, intermingle, or oppose”
― Michel Leiris, Scratches: The Rules of the Game, Volume 1