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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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We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously
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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 started writing for the theatre because I hated it.
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I've always been suspicious of collective truths.
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The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand 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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To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.
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Logic is a very beautiful thing. As long as it is not abused.
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I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.
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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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There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
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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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We have not the time to take our time.
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Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.
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Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
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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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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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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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Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
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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.
Eugene Ionesco