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Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
Eugene Ionesco -
It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions.
Eugene Ionesco
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The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.
Eugene Ionesco -
Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
Eugene Ionesco -
To tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a real bludgeon blow.
Eugene Ionesco -
To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.
Eugene Ionesco -
Every work of art unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.
Eugene Ionesco -
The human comedy does not attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world. I am from elsewhere, and it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls...but where is it?
Eugene Ionesco
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In the history of humanity there are no civilizations or cultures which fail to manifest, in one or a thousand ways, this need for an absolute that is called heaven, freedom, a miracle, a lost paradise to be regained, peace, the going beyond History... 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.... Humanity has always had a nostalgia for the freedom that is only beauty, that is only real; life, plenitude, light.
Eugene Ionesco -
You can only predict things after they have happened.
Eugene Ionesco -
If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think.
Eugene Ionesco -
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.
Eugene Ionesco -
I just can't get used to life.
Eugene Ionesco -
A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.
Eugene Ionesco
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Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.
Eugene Ionesco -
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Eugene Ionesco -
I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.
Eugene Ionesco -
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.
Eugene Ionesco -
I am not capitulating.
Eugene Ionesco -
If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.
Eugene Ionesco
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Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.
Eugene Ionesco -
A civil servant doesn't make jokes.
Eugene Ionesco -
A person who has not completely lost the memory of paradise, even though it is a faint one, will suffer endlessly. He will feel the call of the essential world, will hear the voice that comes from so far away that one cannot find out where it comes from, a voice that cannot guide him.
Eugene Ionesco -
There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.
Eugene Ionesco