I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
ANTONIN ARTAUDYou are quite unnecessary, young man!
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
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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.
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We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
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A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
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This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
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The 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.
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I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.
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By suicide I introduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will … now I choose the direction of my thought and the direction of my faculties, my tendencies, my reality.
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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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Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
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The fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.
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Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.
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Those who live, live off the dead.
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In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
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The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it.
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Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols, for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.
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Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
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How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.
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With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.
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There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
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If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
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Life consists of burning up questions.
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I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
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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.
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All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
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When we speak the word ‘life,’ it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.
ANTONIN ARTAUD