Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.
ANTONIN ARTAUDWhen 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.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.
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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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We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
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I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this–I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
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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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Those who live, live off the dead.
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I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.
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Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
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Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
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I myself am an absolute abyss.
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I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
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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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All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
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You are quite unnecessary, young man!
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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






