We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
ANTONIN ARTAUDIt 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.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.
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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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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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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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There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
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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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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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD