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Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.

Eugene Ionesco

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Eugene Ionesco
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: November 26
Died: 1994
Died: March 28
Diarist
Dramatist
Graphic Artist
Illustrator
Literary Critic
Playwright
Poet
Writer
Stanwood
Washington
Ionesco
Eugen Ionesco
Eugene Ionesco
Incomprehensible
Astonishment
Separates
Explanation
Gateway
Gateways

More quotes by Eugene Ionesco

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No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
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The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.
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Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
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God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.
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Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.
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There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
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People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.
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Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
Eugene Ionesco
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Childhood is the world of miracle or of magic: it is as if creation rose luminously out of the night, all new and fresh and astonishing. Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing. When the world gives you a feeling of déjà vu, when you are used to existence, you become an adult.
Eugene Ionesco
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I've always been suspicious of collective truths.
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Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.
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Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
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It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.
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I am, it seems, an avant-garde dramatist. It would even seem obvious since I am present here at discussions on the avant-garde theatre. It is all entirely official. But what does the term avant-garde mean?
Eugene Ionesco
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You've always made the mistake of being yourself.
Eugene Ionesco
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The human comedy does not attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world. I am from elsewhere, and it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls...but where is it?
Eugene Ionesco
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I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.
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To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.
Eugene Ionesco
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I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.
Eugene Ionesco
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Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.
Eugene Ionesco