Those who live, live off the dead.
ANTONIN ARTAUDDestroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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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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You are quite unnecessary, young man!
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Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
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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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To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
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And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.
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There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
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Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Actors are athletes of the heart.
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In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
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The fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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.
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.
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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 -
I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
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A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.
ANTONIN ARTAUD