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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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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
Theater
Create
Break
Language
Order
Life
Gestures
Theatre
Touch

More quotes by Antonin Artaud

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I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
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I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
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There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
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No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
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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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Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
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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.
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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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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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Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
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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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Not once more will/I be found with beings/who swallowed the rail of life//And one day I found myself with beings/who swallowed the nail of life/-as soon as I lost my matrix mamma,//and the being twisted under him,/and god poured me back to her/(the motherfucker).
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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
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We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.
Antonin Artaud
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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.
Antonin Artaud
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The actor is an athlete of the heart.
Antonin Artaud
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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.
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The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
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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.
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Those who live, live off the dead.
Antonin Artaud