Top 100 Ionesco Quotes
#1. It's not the answer that enlightens, but the question. EUGENE IONESCO
Julia Cameron
#2. Our anxieties were driving us to become other people - he was Earner; I was
Mother, like characters in some phenomenally boring Ionesco play.
Claire Dederer
#3. When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.
Kenneth Tynan
#4. His poor-man's Ionesconian exchanges with Jude suddenly dissolved when he needed Jude to do his calculus homework, at which point Ionesco abruptly transformed into Mussolini,
Hanya Yanagihara
#5. I think that Ionesco's greatest weapon is that he's able to make us laugh at the darkest corners of our souls.
Geoffrey Rush
#6. People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.
Eugene Ionesco
#8. Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.
Eugene Ionesco
#9. The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand myself.
Eugene Ionesco
#10. Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
Eugene Ionesco
#11. It is true that all authors have tried to make propaganda. The great ones are those who failed, who have gained access, consciously or not, to a deeper and more universal reality.
Eugene Ionesco
#12. A 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 Ionesco
#13. Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.
Eugene Ionesco
#14. 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
Eugene Ionesco
#15. Truth has only two sides, but it's the third side that's best.
Eugene Ionesco
#16. An 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 Ionesco
#17. The fact that I despise religion doesn't mean I don't esteem it highly.
Eugene Ionesco
#19. Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.
Eugene Ionesco
#20. We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.
Eugene Ionesco
#23. Why 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 Ionesco
#24. A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.
Eugene Ionesco
#25. Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means; a complexity of words, movements, gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.
Eugene Ionesco
#26. We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously
Eugene Ionesco
#27. To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying
Eugene Ionesco
#28. 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.
Eugene Ionesco
#29. DAISY: I never knew you were such a realist-I thought you were more poetic. Where's your imagination? There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you. Escape into the world of imagination.
Eugene Ionesco
#30. The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.
Eugene Ionesco
#32. Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Eugene Ionesco
#33. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.
Eugene Ionesco
#34. 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.
Eugene Ionesco
#35. Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.
Eugene Ionesco
#36. Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
Eugene Ionesco
#39. Solitude seems to oppress me. And so does the company of other people.
Eugene Ionesco
#41. A work of art really is above all an adventure of the mind.
Eugene Ionesco
#42. To 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
#45. 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.
Eugene Ionesco
#47. Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
Eugene Ionesco
#48. 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.
Eugene Ionesco
#49. I'm looking for a monophysite priest to marry our maid.
Eugene Ionesco
#50. If 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 Ionesco
#51. It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think
Eugene Ionesco
#52. Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name?
~Jack or The Submission
Eugene Ionesco
#53. It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.
Eugene Ionesco
#54. I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old.
Eugene Ionesco
#55. 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.
Eugene Ionesco
#59. The 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 Ionesco
#60. To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.
Eugene Ionesco
#61. Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.
Eugene Ionesco
#62. All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.
Eugene Ionesco
#63. Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
Eugene Ionesco
#64. Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.
Eugene Ionesco
#66. You can only predict things after they have happened.
Eugene Ionesco
#67. Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.
Eugene Ionesco
#68. But you'll never become a rhinoceros, really you won't ... you haven't got the vocation!
Eugene Ionesco
#69. Oh righteous doom, that they who make Pleasure their only end, Ordering the whole life for its sake, Miss that whereto they tend. While they who bid stern duty lead, Content to follow, they, Of duty only taking heed, Find pleasure by the way.
Eugene Ionesco
#70. That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.
Eugene Ionesco
#71. I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.
Eugene Ionesco
#73. All men die in solitude; all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me
Eugene Ionesco
#74. MR. SMITH: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. [Silence.]
MR. MARTIN: Don't you feel well? [Silence.]
MRS. SMITH: No, he's wet his pants. [Silence.]
MRS. MARTIN: Oh, sir, at your age, you shouldn't. [Silence.]
MR. SMITH: The heart is ageless. [Silence.]
Eugene Ionesco
#75. Logic is a very beautiful thing. As long as it is not abused.
Eugene Ionesco
#76. Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
Eugene Ionesco
#77. The 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 Ionesco
#78. God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.
Eugene Ionesco
#79. 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.
Eugene Ionesco
#80. The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have the strength to be uncommon.
Eugene Ionesco
#81. If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper.
Eugene Ionesco
#82. Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.
Eugene Ionesco
#83. I am sad when I think that the years go by like sacks that we mark "Returned Empty," sad when I think that we shall be separated from one another and from ourselves.
Eugene Ionesco
#84. Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
Eugene Ionesco
#85. 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.
Eugene Ionesco
#87. I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.
Eugene Ionesco
#88. The human comedy does not attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world. I am from elsewhere, and it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls ... but where is it?
Eugene Ionesco
#89. FIRE CHIEF: Life is very simple, really. [To the Smiths:] Go on and kiss each other.
Eugene Ionesco
#90. What's chivalrous about saying you've seen a rhinoceros?
Eugene Ionesco
#92. There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
Eugene Ionesco
#93. The 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 Ionesco
#94. It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions.
Eugene Ionesco
#95. It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind,
Eugene Ionesco
#96. I am, it seems, an avant-garde dramatist. It would even seem obvious since I am present here at discussions on the avant-garde theatre. It is all entirely official. But what does the term avant-garde mean?
Eugene Ionesco
#97. A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.
Eugene Ionesco
#98. Rhinoceros The Leader The Future is in Eggs or It Takes all Sorts to Make a World
Eugene Ionesco
#99. I don't believe in seeing evil in everything. I leave that to the inquisitors.
Eugene Ionesco
#100. I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.
Eugene Ionesco
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