Jarry Quotes

#1. You're not so much of a shmuck after all, Jarry."
"Thanks, PITA. But you tell anyone that I'm going soft, and I'll deny it with my last breath."
"Would I do that?" Sarah asks with what she attempts to be an innocent expression, and fails miserably.
"Yes," I say easily. "Yes, you would.

Katelin LaMontagne

#2. I think I am the most impressed with writing styles that defy category, like Kharms or Selby, Breton or Jarry, where you become as interested in the writer as much as the writing itself. It's all these things that make reading so appealing to me.

Henry Rollins

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

Alfred Jarry

#4. I wanted to be a pariah, because all my heroes were cult artists, people who devoted their lives to poking into very narrow, very deep corners - Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, Malcolm Lowry - people who suffered in order to express their vision of life.

Jim Woodring

#5. 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

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

Alfred Jarry

#7. 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

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

Alfred Jarry

#9. 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

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

Alfred Jarry

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

Alfred Jarry

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

Alfred Jarry

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

Alfred Jarry

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

Alfred Jarry

#15. 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

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

Alfred Jarry

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

Alfred Jarry

#18. 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

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

Alfred Jarry

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

Alfred Jarry

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

Alfred Jarry

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Alfred Jarry

#25. 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

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

Alfred Jarry

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

Alfred Jarry

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

Alfred Jarry

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

Alfred Jarry

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

Alfred Jarry

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

Alfred Jarry

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

Alfred Jarry