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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.

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
Wanted
Accomplices
Great
Asylums
Refused
Madness
Protect
Society
Become
Strangled
Certain
Nastiness

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We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
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The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
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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.
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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.
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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 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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[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.
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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.
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I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
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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.
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I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.
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Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
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You are quite unnecessary, young man!
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To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
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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.
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There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
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[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
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Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
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I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
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There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
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