In the history of humanity there are no civilizations or cultures which fail to manifest, in one or a thousand ways, this need for an absolute that is called heaven, freedom, a miracle, a lost paradise to be regained, peace, the going beyond History... There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.... Humanity has always had a nostalgia for the freedom that is only beauty, that is only real; life, plenitude, light.
Eugene IonescoI have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.
Eugene IonescoThe poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.
Eugene IonescoIf one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.
Eugene IonescoExplanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
Eugene IonescoNo society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Eugene IonescoLanguage should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
Eugene IonescoAn avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system.
Eugene IonescoEvery message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.
Eugene IonescoA writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.
Eugene IonescoThere are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
Eugene IonescoSince the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.
Eugene IonescoWhy do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.
Eugene IonescoThe brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.
Eugene IonescoThe 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.
Eugene IonescoA person who has not completely lost the memory of paradise, even though it is a faint one, will suffer endlessly. He will feel the call of the essential world, will hear the voice that comes from so far away that one cannot find out where it comes from, a voice that cannot guide him.
Eugene IonescoWhen silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate "why," that great "why" is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out.
Eugene IonescoIf I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think.
Eugene IonescoAs soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over.... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth.
Eugene IonescoTo become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying
Eugene IonescoThere is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.
Eugene IonescoI believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a will to renewal. This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of crises - of rupture, repudiation and resistance. When there is no crisis, there is stagnation, petrifaction and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.
Eugene IonescoDrama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Eugene IonescoI 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.
Eugene IonescoThe end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.
Eugene IonescoLike all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
Eugene IonescoThe universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.
Eugene IonescoWe are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously
Eugene IonescoIt isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.
Eugene IonescoA really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.
Eugene IonescoTo tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a real bludgeon blow.
Eugene Ionesco