Alfred Jarry Quotes

#1. Dawn was breaking, like the light from another world.

Alfred Jarry

#2. Applause that comes thundering with such force you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.

Alfred Jarry

#3. Laughter is born out of the discovery of the contradictory.

Alfred Jarry

#4. It is one of the great joys of home ownership to fire a pistol in one's own bedroom

Alfred Jarry

#5. We believe ... that the applause of silence is the only kind that counts.

Alfred Jarry

#6. It is conventional to call 'monster' any blending of dissonant elements. I call 'monster' every original inexhaustible beauty.

Alfred Jarry

#7. Talking about things that are understandable only weighs down the mind.

Alfred Jarry

#8. The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.

Alfred Jarry

#9. Papa Ubu: Captain Bordure, I've decided to make you Duke of Lithuania.

Alfred Jarry

#10. The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.

Alfred Jarry

#11. There are only hallucinations, or perceptions, and that there are neither nights nor days ... and that life is continuous; yet that one would never be aware of its continuity, nor even that life exists without these pendulum movements; and life is primarily verified by the beating of the heart

Alfred Jarry

#12. Dieu est le point tangent de ze ro et de l'infini. God is the tangential point of zero and the infinite.

Alfred Jarry

#13. The military hospital is the most cheerful of militaty buildings because there are so few uniforms inside.

Alfred Jarry

#14. And he had to have freedom-not even that, just to read and sleep in peace, without a uniform-sooner still.

Alfred Jarry

#15. One can show one's contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one's life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.

Alfred Jarry

#16. Papa Ubu: Yes, gentlemen, but however beautiful it may be, it can't compare with Poland. Because if there weren't any Poland, there wouldn't be any Poles!

Alfred Jarry

#17. That's a beautiful speech, but nobody's listening. Let's go.

Alfred Jarry

#18. Anti-alcoholics are unfortunates in the grip of water, that terrible poison, so corrosive that out of all substances it has been chosen for washing and scouring, and a drop of water added to a clear liquid like Absinthe, muddles it.

Alfred Jarry

#19. Blind and unwavering undisciplined at all times constitutes the real strength of all free men.

Alfred Jarry

#20. You're looking exceptionally ugly tonight, Madam, is it because we have company?

Alfred Jarry

#21. To be weird! That is my goal!

Alfred Jarry

#22. Duration is the transformation of a succession into a reversion. In other words: THE BECOMING OF A MEMORY.

Alfred Jarry

#23. God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.

Alfred Jarry

#24. To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

Alfred Jarry

#25. God is the shortest distance from zero to infinity.

Alfred Jarry

#26. The work of art is a stuffed crocodile.

Alfred Jarry

#27. We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

Alfred Jarry

#28. I am dying. Please ... bring me a toothpick.

Alfred Jarry

#29. JARRY: (To audience) As to the action which is about to begin, it takes place in Poland - that is to say, nowhere.

Alfred Jarry