Eugene Ionesco Quotes
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Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
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Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
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Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
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Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
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That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.
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Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.
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It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind.
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In the name of religion, one tortures, persecutes, builds pyres. In the guise of ideologies, one massacres, tortures and kills. In the name of justice one punishes...in the name of love of one's country or of one's race hates other countries, despises them, massacres them. In the name of equality and brotherhood there is suppression and torture. There is nothing in common between the means and the end, the means go far beyond the end...ideologies and religion... are the alibis of the means.
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An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system.
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Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.
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It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
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Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
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Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
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I am, it seems, an avant-garde dramatist. It would even seem obvious since I am present here at discussions on the avant-garde theatre. It is all entirely official. But what does the term avant-garde mean?
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A man with a soul is not like every other man.
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The critic should describe, and not prescribe.
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To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.
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Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.
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A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.
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People who don't read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn't it?
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There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.
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There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
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The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
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Childhood is the world of miracle or of magic: it is as if creation rose luminously out of the night, all new and fresh and astonishing. Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing. When the world gives you a feeling of "déjà vu," when you are used to existence, you become an adult.