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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.

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

Asylum Defend Divine Intellectual Society Trouble
I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Actor Burning Call Flame Laughter Myself
We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Human Literature Ourselves
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Character Sex Theatre
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
I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Moments Myself Unique Work
Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Destruction Force Image Poetry Relationahip Thrive
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 ARTAUD

Artistic Flame Hell Ourselves Time Victim
In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Mindset Ourselves Present Skin State
I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Art Existence Life Myself Separate Work
The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Guide Instint Practice
Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Art Culture Expression Language Limitation Magic Oneself Shatter Theatre
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Built Exception Hell Paint Writing
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
I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Conversation Hang Morning Myself
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Drive Experience Kind Liberty Potential Reality Revolution Shake

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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