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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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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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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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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.
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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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Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.
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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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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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God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.
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Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
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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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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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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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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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You've always made the mistake of being yourself.
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The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.
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I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.
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The critic should describe, and not prescribe.
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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.
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