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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.

Antonin Artaud

I am a man by virtue of my hands and my feet, my belly, my heart of meat, my stomach whose knots reunite me to the putrefaction of life.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Hands Life Man Myself Virtue
The fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Language Noise Ruin Theatre Writing
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Conscious Crime Drugs Experience Fundamental Poetry Public War
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Art Ideas Mistake Ourselves Poetry Power
The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Instrument Live Shadow Theatre True Way
I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Moments Myself Unique Work
[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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Definition Honor Ideas Man Preference Superior
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

Creation Diagram Mindset Myself Soul
This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Beautiful Direction Lose True
Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Escape Forever Hell Man World
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

Absence Feeling Myself Present Time Work
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

Book Leadership Myself Open Reality Writing
I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Abandonment Dreams Fever Law Myself Search
A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Asylum Defend Divine Intellectual Society Trouble
Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Breathe Leaving Mindset Ourselves Surrender Time
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Death Hold Live Myself Terror

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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