Eugène Ionesco Quotes

She has regular features but yet one could not say that she was pretty. She is too big and too stout. Her features are not regular and yet one could say that she is very pretty. She is too small and too thin. She's a voice teacher

Logician: A cat has four paws. Old Gentleman: My dog had four paws. Logician: Then it's a cat. Old Gentleman: So my dog is a cat? Logician: And the contrary is also true.

Si es absolutamente necesario que el arte o el teatro sirvan para algo, será para enseñar a la gente que hay actividades que no sirven para nada y que es indispensable que las haya.

Tous les chats sont mortels. Socrate est mortel. Donc Socrate est un chat.

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

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.

Living is abnormal.

But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I know all that, I shall only have learnt how to get along after a fashion in the enormous gaol, the oppressive prison in which I am held. What a farce, what a snare, what a booby-trap. We were born cheated. For if we are not to know, if there is nothing to know, why do we have this longing to know?

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

I remember one day there was a military parade. A lieutenant was marching in front of the palace guards. I can still see him carrying the flag. I was standing beside a peasant with a big fur hat who was watching the parade, absolutely wide-eyed. Suddenly the lieutenant broke rank, rushed toward us, and slapped the peasant, saying, “Take off your hat when you see the flag!” I was horrified. My thoughts were not yet organized or coherent at that age, but I had feelings, a certain nascent humanism, and I found these things inadmissible. The worst thing of all, for an adolescent, was to be different from everyone else. Could I be right and the whole country wrong?

Nefericire cel ce vrea să-şi păstreze originalitatea! Ei bine, asta e. Am sa ma apar impotriva tuturor! Puşca, unde mi-e puşca? (Se întoarce cu faţa către capetele de rinoceri din fundal şi strigă) Am să mă apăr împotriva lumii întregi, mă voi apăra! Sunt ultimul om şi voi rămîne aşa pînă la cea din urmă suflare! Nu mă dau bătut!

I ought not to have stirred, I was swept into the dance, caught up in the whirling movement of things. Being in Time means running after the present. You run after things, you run with things, you flow away.

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.

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.

Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.