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A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt.

Antonin Artaud

Actors are athletes of the heart.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Actor Athlete Heart One Liner
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Genius Head Himself Life Preparation Shine Solution Understand
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Death Hold Live Myself Terror
You are quite unnecessary, young man!
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Man Necessary Quite Young
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

Battle Beginning Eyes Impossible Ourselves Realize Stage Symbol Theatre
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

Conscious Crime Drugs Experience Fundamental Poetry Public War
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

Consciousness Day Death Force Necessary Ourselves Philosophy
I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Moments Myself Unique Work
We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Feeling Heart Lying Right
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

Art Ideas Mistake Ourselves Poetry Power
Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Chaos Myself Sarcasm Sink
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

Essential Forget Language Myself Mysterious Possible Talk
The fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Language Noise Ruin Theatre Writing
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Enough Life Myself Stage Tragedy
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Beggar Language Talk True
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
To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Break Creation Language Life Order Theatre Touch
With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Follow Language Public Society
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
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
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Asylum Greatness Protect Protection Refusal Society
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

Form Fragile Life Reach Surface Talk Word
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

Body Desperate Destroy Soul World Yourself
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
I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
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Abandonment Dreams Fever Law Myself Search
I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Art Existence Life Myself Separate Work
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Destroy Myself Suicide Togetherness

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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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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Popular Authors

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