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The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.

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
Useless
Essential
Essentials
Activity
Art
Men
Arts

More quotes by Eugene Ionesco

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Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.
Eugene Ionesco
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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.
Eugene Ionesco
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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.
Eugene Ionesco
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There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
Eugene Ionesco
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Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
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.
Eugene Ionesco
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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.
Eugene Ionesco
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We haven't the time to take out time.
Eugene Ionesco
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To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.
Eugene Ionesco
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It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.
Eugene Ionesco
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Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
Eugene Ionesco
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Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Eugene Ionesco
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Logic is a very beautiful thing. As long as it is not abused.
Eugene Ionesco
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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.
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
Eugene Ionesco
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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?
Eugene Ionesco
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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.
Eugene Ionesco
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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.
Eugene Ionesco
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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.
Eugene Ionesco
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Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
Eugene Ionesco