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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
Gateways
Incomprehensible
Astonishment
Separates
Explanation
Gateway

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Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.
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A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.
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I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.
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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?
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We have not the time to take our time.
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Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
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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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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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We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously
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When I was born, I was almost fourteen years old. That's why I was able to understand more easily than most what it was all about.
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The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.
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Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.
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Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
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Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
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We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.
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All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.
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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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God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.
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You've always made the mistake of being yourself.
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All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers... Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about... Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion.
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