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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
Gateway
Gateways
Incomprehensible
Astonishment
Separates
Explanation

More quotes by Eugene Ionesco

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The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.
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God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.
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We have not the time to take our time.
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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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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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There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
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It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.
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Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
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A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
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I've always been suspicious of collective truths. I think an idea is true when it hasn't been put into words and that the moment it's put into words it becomes exaggerated. Because the moment it's put into words there's an abuse, an excess in the expression of the idea that makes it false.
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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?
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I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.
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Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.
Eugene Ionesco
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Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.
Eugene Ionesco
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The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
Eugene Ionesco
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Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
Eugene Ionesco
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I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.
Eugene Ionesco
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Logic is a very beautiful thing. As long as it is not abused.
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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 is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
Eugene Ionesco