Eugene Ionesco
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Eugene Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco; 26 November 1909 – 28 March 1994) was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and one of the foremost figures of the French Avant-garde theatre. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict the solitude and insignificance of human existence in a tangible way...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth26 November 1909
CountryFrance
aware dreamed dreaming dreams fleeting image life lived memory moving profoundly quite sure whether
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.
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The unpleasant thing about society today is nowadays is that there is a confusion between people and their function; or rather, people are tempted to identify with the function they perform. This is what's happening, particularly in totalitarian soc
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Idiom is larger than geography; it is the hot breath of a people singing, slashing, explorative. Imagery becomes the magic denominator, the language of a passage, saying the ancient unchanging particulars.
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You can only predict things after they've happened
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There 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.
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No 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.
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Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.
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A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.
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A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
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To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying
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There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
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Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.
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Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.
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I 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.