Eugene Ionesco Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• I just can't get used to life.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Life, Used

  Eugene Ionesco (2015). “Rhinoceros and Other Plays: Includes: The Leader; The Future Is in Eggs; It Takes All Kinds to Make a World”, p.10, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  9 Copy quote

• When silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate "why," that great "why" is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Philosophical, Light, Silence

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Humorous, Years, Able

  6 Copy quote

• A man with a soul is not like every other man.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Men, Soul

  4 Copy quote

• A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Travel, Writing, Thinking

  34 Copy quote

• Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Childhood, Moments, Astonishing

  12 Copy quote

• Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Spiritual, Expression, Needs

  64 Copy quote

• The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Distance, Moving, Science

  17 Copy quote

• I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Writing, Theatre, Hated

  14 Copy quote

• I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a will to renewal. This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of crises - of rupture, repudiation and resistance. When there is no crisis, there is stagnation, petrifaction and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Art, Believe, Rupture

  18 Copy quote

• Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Art, Mean, Ideas

  "A Reply to Kenneth Tynan: The Playwright's Role". The Observer, June 29, 1958.

  4 Copy quote

• I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Years, Sometimes, Forget

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Inspirational, Children, Night

  8 Copy quote

• We haven't the time to take out time.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Time, Havens

  10 Copy quote

• A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Government, Bureaucracy, Servant

  Tuer sans Gages (The Killer) act 1 (1958)

  5 Copy quote

• Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Circles, Vicious, Strokes

  9 Copy quote

• For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; asthough there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Fall, Together, Foundation

  9 Copy quote

• As soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over.... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Philosophical, Believe, Childhood

  9 Copy quote

• Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Despair, Trying, Way

  8 Copy quote

• I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Hate, Night, Vanity

  26 Copy quote

• 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

  Song, Water, Theatre

  22 Copy quote

• 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

  Drama, Successful, Play

  Eugene Ionesco (2015). “Amedee, The New Tenant, Victims of Duty: Three Plays”, p.79, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  8 Copy quote

• A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Two, Smell, Noses

  11 Copy quote

• I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Dream, Fall, Waste

  4 Copy quote

• I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Long, Solitude

  7 Copy quote

Page 3 of 4

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin