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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

I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.
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Moments Myself Unique Work
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
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Built Exception Hell Paint Writing
Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.
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Chaos Myself Sarcasm Sink
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
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Enough Life Myself Stage Tragedy
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
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Born Earth Food Myself People Preference
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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Genius Head Himself Life Preparation Shine Solution Understand
You are quite unnecessary, young man!
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Man Necessary Quite Young
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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Asylum Greatness Protect Protection Refusal Society
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
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Death Hold Live Myself Terror
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.
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Essential Forget Language Myself Mysterious Possible Talk
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt.
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Drive Experience Kind Liberty Potential Reality Revolution Shake
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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Design Direction Introduction Myself Nature Reality Suicide Tendency
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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Artistic Flame Hell Ourselves Time Victim
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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Beyond Consciousness Finding Man Material Ourselves Wonder
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
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Beggar Language Talk True
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.
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Hands Life Man Myself Virtue
With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.
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Follow Language Public Society
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
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Character Sex Theatre
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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Battle Beginning Eyes Impossible Ourselves Realize Stage Symbol Theatre
Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
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Difference Feeling Rich Sensuality Spiritual
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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Consciousness Day Death Force Necessary Ourselves Philosophy
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.
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Cleaning Despair Elimination Failure Himself Human Right Try
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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Act Affirmation Live Myself Reason Risk See Truth
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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Encouragement Function Hard Ourselves Sleep Wake Up
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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Angel Human Live Need Pain Strength Swallow Understand
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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Beautiful Direction Lose True
To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
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Break Creation Language Life Order Theatre Touch

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.

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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.

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Popular Authors

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