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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
Separates
Explanation
Gateway
Gateways
Incomprehensible
Astonishment

More quotes by Eugene Ionesco

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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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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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Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.
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To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.
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The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand 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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To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying
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Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
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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 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.
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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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Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
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Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.
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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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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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I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.
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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.
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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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