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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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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
Desperate
Destroy
Flesh
Hope
Lives
Rotting
Body
Tortured
Soul
Solace
World
Abandon

More quotes by 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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If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
Antonin Artaud
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We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
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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.
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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.
Antonin Artaud
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And war is wonderful, isn't it? For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step. In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides.
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We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
Antonin Artaud
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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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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.
Antonin Artaud
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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.
Antonin Artaud
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A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .
Antonin Artaud
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There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
Antonin Artaud
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The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it.
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.
Antonin Artaud
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The actor is an athlete of the heart.
Antonin Artaud
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Those who live, live off the dead.
Antonin Artaud
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I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
Antonin Artaud
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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.
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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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.
Antonin Artaud