Antonin Artaud Quotes - Page 2

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• Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

  Antonin Artaud

  War, Poetry, Drug

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.122, Grove Press

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• If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.

  Antonin Artaud

  Suicide, Suicidal, Together Again

  Antonin Artaud, Jack Hirschman (1963). “Artaud Anthology”, p.56, City Lights Books

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• I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.

  Antonin Artaud

  Pain, Angel, Years

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• If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.

  Antonin Artaud

  Magic, Consideration, Form

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• It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us.

  Antonin Artaud

  Impact, Space, Giving

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• I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.

  Antonin Artaud

  Flames, Laughing, Burning

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• We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

  Antonin Artaud

  Death, Long Ago, One Day

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• I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.

  Antonin Artaud

  Death, Real, Terror

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.92, Univ of California Press

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• The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.

  Antonin Artaud

  Order, Theatre, Passionate

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.122, Grove Press

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• In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.

  Antonin Artaud

  Men, Peyote, Psychedelic

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• We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.

  Antonin Artaud

  Believe, Men, Doe

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.13, Grove Press

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• We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

  Antonin Artaud

  Men, Literature, Want

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• All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

  Antonin Artaud

  Writing, Pigs, People

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.85, Univ of California Press

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• Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.

  Antonin Artaud

  Determination, Decision, Intention

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.101, Grove Press

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• I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.

  Antonin Artaud

  Truth, Dice, Affirmation

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.91, Univ of California Press

  34 Copy quote

• The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm.

  Antonin Artaud

  Lying, Believe, Men

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.109, Univ of California Press

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• There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.

  Antonin Artaud

  Mean, Soul, Humanity

  Antonin Artaud (1988). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.99, Univ of California Press

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• So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.

  Antonin Artaud

  Mean, Men, Long

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.99, Univ of California Press

  23 Copy quote

• Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

  Antonin Artaud

  Analogies, Association, Destruction

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• It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.

  Antonin Artaud

  Order, Drug, Absence

  "Appeal to Youth: Intoxication-Disintoxication (1934)". "Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings". Book by Antonin Artaud, 1976.

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• Those who live, live off the dead.

  Antonin Artaud

  Antonin Artaud (1995). “Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period”

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• Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.

  Antonin Artaud

  Beautiful, Reading, May

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.78, Grove Press

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• I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

  Antonin Artaud

  Suicide, Time, Morning

  "Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society". Essay by Antonin Artaud, 1947.

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• When we speak the word 'life,' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

  Antonin Artaud

  Life, Understanding, Facts

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.13, Grove Press

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• How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.

  Antonin Artaud

  Dream, Sleep, Eye

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.11, Grove Press

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