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We have not the time to take our time.

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
Take
Time

More quotes by 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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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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Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.
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'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.
Eugene Ionesco
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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.
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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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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All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.
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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Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
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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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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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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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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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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A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
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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Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.
Eugene Ionesco