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.
ANTONIN ARTAUDSo 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.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 -
There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 -
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 -
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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