Quotes About Absurdism

#1. But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.

Albert Camus

#2. Suddenly absurdism wasn't an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort - and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.

George Saunders

#3. When you see a culture where the intellectual architects of the invasion are not shamed for their behavior but rewarded within the mainstream media culture, black comedy, satire, absurdism is the only response.

John Cusack

#4. I've always thought of absurdism as a French fad I'd like to belong to.

Robert Sheckley

#5. Enthralling! The mix of absurdism and intellectualism is perfect!

Neil Genzlinger

#6. Absurdism was really just realism seen from close to the bottom.

George Saunders

#7. Usually at the core of fiction that has some element of the absurd there tends to be an examination of some societal ills that we should talk about more than we do. And it's funny, of course, so we have that release valve with absurdism. It offers us a safe way to explore difficult subject matter.

Laurie Foos

#8. Humor and absurdism are inevitable. If you look at our current massive flow of consumer products and digital communication and related media from a sort of astute perspective and carefully state what you see you can't help but sounding like you're joking.

Aaron Belz

#9. A typical 'Larry King Live' is a pastiche whose absurdism defies parody. Wearing his trademark suspenders and purple shirts, he looks as if he's strapped to the chair with vertical seat belts, unable to eject.

James Wolcott

#10. I am unable to believe in a God susceptible to prayer. I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits, and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

Quentin Crisp

#11. If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

Albert Camus

#12. 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

#13. We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them.

Albert Camus

#14. Long before the Theater of the Absurd, Woolrich discovered that an incomprehensible universe is best reflected in an incomprehensible story.
("Introduction")

Francis M. Nevins Jr.

#15. We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on.

Steven Erikson

#16. So, according to you, the other God does exist after all?'
'He doesn't exist, but He is. There's no pain in a stone, but there's pain in the fear of a stone.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#17. He wishes he were a skilled poet, it would fit his chosen image perfectly; the poor, tragic, tortured artiste. But he has no talent for words, neither for paints nor music; his uselessness is tremendously total.

Curtis Ackie

#18. All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime ... it is itself an absurd phenomenon.

Albert Camus

#19. The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.

Albert Camus

#20. The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It's unequivocally absurd.

Zoltan Istvan

#21. Like the playwrights of the Absurd, Woolrich recognized that a senseless story best mirrors a senseless existence.

Francis M. Nevins Jr.

#22. Existence is illusory and it is eternal.

Albert Camus

#23. Just because someone is a loner, it doesn't mean they're alone. And just because someone is alone, it doesn't mean they're lonely.

Jason Daniel Chaplin

#24. Unaware that he is only interested in the presumed parched pucker in her pants, she is more than happy to give him her phone number.

Curtis Ackie

#25. Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

Albert Camus

#26. And it's inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.

Clarice Lispector

#27. I am interested only in "nonsense"; only in that which makes no practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestations.

Daniil Kharms

#28. He shook his head sadly. 'What a fool you are. You've wasted your ability searching for something that doesn't exist.'
'When will you realize you don't exist?

Naguib Mahfouz

#29. They are young and well built, they have another thirty years ahead of them. So they don't hurry, they take their time, and they are quite right. Once they have been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#30. The arrow of time obscures memory of both past and future circumstance with innumerable fallacies, the least trivial of which is perception.

Ashim Shanker

#31. Fighting for freedom" is a myth. There's only freedom in uniting. You're not really free with an, "Us vs Them" mentality; because you are constantly defending yourself. And in fighting, there's no time for freedom.

Jason Daniel Chaplin

#32. Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there's always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.

Albert Camus

#33. Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Albert Camus

#34. New York, of course, is to be in endless surreal situations where a fifty-thousand dollar, gun-metal Mercedez pulls up into a puddle of blood, and out steps a twenty-five karat blonde transvestite with a two dollar wristwatch.

Tom Waits

#35. Back in our apartment, lights out, The Professor emerged from beneath the bed." - from "The Professor Spends the Night," in issue 4 of Literary Orphans

Joseph Patrick Pascale

#36. Sure, people can make you happy, but no one can stop you from being happy.

Jason Daniel Chaplin

#37. Go get your gun because God won't show.
He sent a poet instead.
The Don Quixote of the ICU. Quite impressive for a cripple. Munchhausen by proxy of a muse.
Tempt not a desperate man. This split lip is for you. I traded it for an outdated tooth.

Keith Buckley

#38. I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless.

Albert Camus