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.
ANTONIN ARTAUDBefore 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.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
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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.
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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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Those who live, live off the dead.
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There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
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I myself am an absolute abyss.
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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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Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
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All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
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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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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.
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I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
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We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.
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We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
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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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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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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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Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
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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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Life consists of burning up questions.
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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.
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