Eugène Ionesco Quotes

Obositul ins

Cineva rupea din el
cîte puțintel.

L-a lăsat decolorat
și cutremurat,

Mirat s-a pipăit
dar nu s-a regăsit.

Din el o forța rea
creștea și-l cuprindea.

Obositul ins
se lăsă cuprins.

But you'll never become a rhinoceros, really you won't ... you haven't got the vocation!

Now didn't I warn you, just a little while ago: arithmetic leads to philology, and philology leads to crime . . .

Politicians are either there or here or totally at home. Their finitude is more than sufficient unto itself. I don’t mean to imply that I’m any better than they which does not mean that they are any better than I. Which doesn’t mean anything at all.

A work of art really is above all an adventure of the mind.

"I've always been suspicious of collective truths".

Psihoză colectivă, domnule Dudard, psihoză colectivă! Ca şi religia, care-i opiumul popoarelor!

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.

Un médecin consciencieux doit mourir avec le malade s'ils ne peuvent pas guérir ensemble. Le commandant d'un bateau périt avec le bateau, dans les vagues. Il ne lui survit pas.

Ever since I was fifteen, that is to say from that moment when I lost all that was left me of my childhood, from the moment when I ceased to be aware of the present and knew only the past hurrying into the future, that is to say into the abyss, ever since I became fully conscious of time I have felt old and I have wanted to live. I have run after life as though to catch time, and I have tried to live. I have run after life so much that it has always escaped me, I have run, I have never been late and never too early, and yet I have never caught up with it: it is as though I have run alongside of it.

What is life, I may be asked. For me, life is not Time; it is not this state of existence, for ever escaping us, slipping between our fingers and vanishing like a ghost as soon as you try to grasp it. For me it is, it must be, the present, presentness, plenitude. I have run after life so much that I have lost it.

...nu fiţi indulgenţi (indulgenta e o laşitate) şi să nu vă fie frică să mărturisiţi clar că tot ce se face în cultura noastră este nouăzeci şi nouă la sută rizibil şi unu la sută lizibil. Nu aveţi încredere nici în acest lizibil şi aveţi mai degrabă încredere în ilizibil. când vi s-o prezenta ceva ilizibil, adică ceva care trebuie nu să fie recunoscut, ci cunoscut pentru întâia dată, poate să găsiţi acolo ceva trainic.

People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.

Do rhinoceroses cough?

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.

I didn't mean you were stupid. It's just that you're not logical, which isn't the same thing at all.