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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
The critic should describe, and not prescribe.
Eugene Ionesco
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.
Eugene Ionesco
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
Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.
Eugene Ionesco
God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.
Eugene Ionesco
To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.
Eugene Ionesco
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.
Eugene Ionesco
The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand myself.
Eugene Ionesco
I am told, in a dream you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream.
Eugene Ionesco
Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
Eugene Ionesco
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.
Eugene Ionesco
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.
Eugene Ionesco
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
We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously
Eugene Ionesco
A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
Eugene Ionesco
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.
Eugene Ionesco
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
Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
Eugene Ionesco
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
There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
Eugene Ionesco