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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

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Antonin Artaud
Age: 51 †
Born: 1896
Born: September 4
Died: 1948
Died: March 4
Actor
Author
Comedy Writer
Director
Essayist
Film Actor
Film Critic
Film Director
Painter
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Marseille
France
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud
Form
Surface
Must
Reach
Never
Understood
Life
Word
Fluctuating
Understanding
Referring
Fact
Fragile
Speak
Center
Facts
Forms

More quotes by Antonin Artaud

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There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
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We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
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Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.
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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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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.
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[Nietzsche's] definition of cruelty informs Artaud's own, declaring that all art embodies and intensifies the underlying brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience ... Although Artaud did not formally cite Nietzsche, [their writing] contains a familiar persuasive authority, a similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis.
Antonin Artaud
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It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh's stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.
Antonin Artaud
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I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
Antonin Artaud
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I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself
Antonin Artaud
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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
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You are quite unnecessary, young man!
Antonin Artaud
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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.
Antonin Artaud
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It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us.
Antonin Artaud
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These terrifying forms which advance on me, I feel that the despair they bring is alive. It slips into this nucleus of life beyond which the paths of eternity extend. It is truly an eternal separation. They slip their knives into this center where I feel myself a man, they sever those vital ties which bind me to the dream of my lucid reality.
Antonin Artaud
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Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
Antonin Artaud
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To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
Antonin Artaud
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All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
Antonin Artaud
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Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.
Antonin Artaud
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Those who live, live off the dead.
Antonin Artaud
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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