Antonin Artaud Quotes - Page 3

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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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• We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.

  Antonin Artaud

  Lying, Heart, Matter

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• The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.

  Antonin Artaud

  Art, Ideas, Leisure

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.77, Grove Press

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• Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

  Antonin Artaud

  Needs, Culture, Bones

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• Actors are athletes of the heart.

  Antonin Artaud

  Heart, Athlete, Actors

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• If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself, but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.

  Antonin Artaud

  Suicide, Self Harm, Suicidal

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

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• Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.

  Antonin Artaud

  Roots, Mind, Caves

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.103, Univ of California Press

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• There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.

  Antonin Artaud

  Theatre, Brothels

  Antonin Artaud (1999). “Collected Works”, Riverrun Press

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• Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

  Antonin Artaud

  Reading, Way, Poet

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

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• Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols... for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.

  Antonin Artaud

  Eye, Theatre, Battle

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• Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.

  Antonin Artaud

  Art, Magic, Shadow

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.12, Grove Press

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• The fixation of the theater in one language--written words, music, lights, noises--betokens its imminent ruin.

  Antonin Artaud

  Light, Noise, Ruins

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.12, Grove Press

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• But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.

  Antonin Artaud

  Math, Understanding, Scientist

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.497, Univ of California Press

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• I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.

  Antonin Artaud

  Suicide, Morning, Science

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• In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

  Antonin Artaud

  Mind, Skins, States

  Antonin Artaud (1958). “The Theater and Its Double”, p.99, Grove Press

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• With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.

  Antonin Artaud

  Bombs, Language, Tyranny

  Le Monde, September 11, 1970.

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• I am a man by virtue of my hands and my feet, my belly, my heart of meat, my stomach whose knots reunite me to the putrefaction of life.

  Antonin Artaud

  Heart, Men, Hands

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.94, Univ of California Press

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• Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.

  Antonin Artaud

  Men, Unhappy, World

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.100, Univ of California Press

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• When I think about myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new space. I am on the moon as others are on their balconies. I participate in planetary gravitation in the fissures of my mind.

  Antonin Artaud

  Moon, Thinking, Space

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.96, Univ of California Press

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• It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh's stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.

  Antonin Artaud

  Storm, Climate, Earth

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.484, Univ of California Press

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• And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

  Antonin Artaud

  Flames, Artistic, Victim

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

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• It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.

  Antonin Artaud

  Struggle, Night, People

  Antonin Artaud, Susan Sontag (1976). “Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings”, p.486, Univ of California Press

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• So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.

  Antonin Artaud

  Nastiness, Asylums, Madness

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

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• The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.

  Antonin Artaud

  Actors, Instinct, Crude

  Antonin Artaud (1974). “Collected Works”, Calder Publications Limited

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