Eugene Ionesco Quotes
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I've always been suspicious of collective truths. I think an idea is true when it hasn't been put into words and that the moment it's put into words it becomes exaggerated. Because the moment it's put into words there's an abuse, an excess in the expression of the idea that makes it false.
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If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.
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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.
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Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.
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Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.
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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.
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We haven't the time to take out time.
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As soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over.... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth.
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When silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate "why," that great "why" is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out.
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I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is.
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It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.
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When I was born, I was almost fourteen years old. That's why I was able to understand more easily than most what it was all about.
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Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means; a complexity of words, movements, gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.
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Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can't be a lie.
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We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.
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Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name? ~Jack or The Submission
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I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.
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Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.
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It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.
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The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.