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The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

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
Critics
Prescribe
Critic
Describe

More quotes by Eugene Ionesco

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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.
Eugene Ionesco
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Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.
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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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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People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.
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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I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.
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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Logic is a very beautiful thing. As long as it is not abused.
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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Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.
Eugene Ionesco
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Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
Eugene Ionesco
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I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.
Eugene Ionesco
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A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.
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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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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Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
Eugene Ionesco
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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
Eugene Ionesco
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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?
Eugene Ionesco
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To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.
Eugene Ionesco