Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
ANTONIN ARTAUDLike 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.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Don’t tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
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 -
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt.
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 -
In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
ANTONIN ARTAUD