Eugène Ionesco Quotes

Dieu est mort, Marx est mort et moi-même je ne me sens pas très bien

We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores — its anti-Semitism for example. I was not Jewish, but I pronounced my r’s as the French do and was often taken for a Jew, for which I was ruthlessly bullied.… It was the time of the rise of Nazism and everyone was becoming pro-Nazi — writers, teachers, biologists, historians … It was a plague! They despised France and England because they were yiddified and racially impure.

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Ruptura între ființă și gandire.Gandirea,golită de ființă,se usucă,se vestejește,nu mai e gandire.Într-adevăr,gandirea e expresia ființei,coincide cu ființa.Poți vorbi fără să gandești.Pentru asta avem la dispoziție clișeele,adică automatismele.Gandirea adevărată nu poate fi decat vie.

Ne m'envoie plus ouvrir la porte. Tu as vu que c'était inutile. L'expérience nous apprend que lorsqu'on entend sonner à la porte, c'est qu'il n'y a jamais personne.

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

There are now many invisible people on stage.

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is.

The Pataphysique is not dead. It lives on in the minds of certain men, even if they are not aware of it. It has gone into “occultation,” as we say, and will come back again one day.

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

Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name!

All men die in solitude; all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me

We need to be virtually bludgeoned into detachment from our daily lives, our habits and mental laziness, which conceal from us the strangeness of the world. Without a fresh virginity of mind, without a new and healthy awareness of existential reality, there can be no theatre and no art either; the real must be in a way dislocated, before it can be re-integrated.

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.

Mon oncle, que Dieu ait son âme, était l'ivrogne officiel du village. Il s'y engageait en chancelant. Il criait : « Mon Dieu, je vous en prie, laissez-moi passer, je ne boirai plus jamais. » Mais, quand il arrivait sur l'autre rive, il dansait, il chantait, il criait : « Je boirai encore. Ah, ah, ah! »

Pray to the I don't-know-who I hope : Jesus Christ.