I myself am an absolute abyss.
ANTONIN ARTAUDThe idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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Life consists of burning up questions.
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There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
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I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
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So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.
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Those who live, live off the dead.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
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There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
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There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
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So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD