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 ARTAUDThose who live, live off the dead.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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Those who live, live off the dead.
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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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When I think about myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new space. I am on the moon as others are on their balconies. I participate in planetary gravitation in the fissures of my mind.
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If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.
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Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.
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I myself am an absolute abyss.
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Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
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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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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.
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I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.
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Don’t tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
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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.
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If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
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I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.
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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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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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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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The fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.
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I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
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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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All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
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We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
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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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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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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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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