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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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Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
Antonin Artaud
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
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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The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
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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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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We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
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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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
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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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I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
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