Quote

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 Artaud

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Never
Shadow
Life
Theater
Grope
Moving
Stir
Living
Ceased
Use
Continues
Makes
Shadows
True
Moves
Way
Instruments

More quotes by Antonin Artaud

Image
The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
Antonin Artaud
Image
We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
Antonin Artaud
Image
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
Image
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
Antonin Artaud
Image
I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
Antonin Artaud
Image
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
Image
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
Image
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
Antonin Artaud
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
Antonin Artaud
Image
But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.
Antonin Artaud
Image
You are quite unnecessary, young man!
Antonin Artaud
Image
I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.
Antonin Artaud
Image
Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
Antonin Artaud
Image
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.
Antonin Artaud
Image
However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.
Antonin Artaud