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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

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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
Come
Incomprehensible
Thing
Philosophical
Close
Possible
Understanding
Understand
Given
Everything

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Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
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Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
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Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.
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The critic should describe, and not prescribe.
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A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
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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?
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I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.
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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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A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.
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You've always made the mistake of being yourself.
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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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There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
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God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.
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It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
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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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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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Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.
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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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To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.
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Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
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