Alfred Jarry QUOTES

1 " The work of art is a stuffed crocodile. "

2 " 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 , Selected Works

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

― Alfred Jarry , Days and Nights

4 " God is the tangential point between zero and infinity. "

― Alfred Jarry , Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician: A Neo-Scientific Novel

5 " Dawn was breaking, like the light from another world. "

― Alfred Jarry , The Supermale

6 " [Alfred] Jarry’s teaching could be summarized thus: every man is capable of showing his contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the universe by making his own life a poem of incoherence and absurdity. "

― Alfred Jarry , Ubu Roi

7 " Pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, will describe a universe which can be - and perhaps should be - envisaged in the place of the traditional one. "

― Alfred Jarry

8 " Maintenant que la glace est rompue, causons." (Now the ice is broken, let's talk.)

-After shooting into a mirror "

― Alfred Jarry

9 " That's a beautiful speech, but nobody's listening. Let's go. "

― Alfred Jarry , Ubu Roi

10 " It is one of the great joys of home ownership to fire a pistol in one's own bedroom "

― Alfred Jarry

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

― Alfred Jarry

12 " I intended that when the curtain went up the scene should confront the public like the exaggerating mirror in the stories of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, in which the depraved saw themselves with dragons' bodies, or bulls' horns, or whatever corresponded to their particular vice. It is not surprising that the public should have been aghast at the sight of its other self, which it had never before been shown completely. This ignoble other-self, as Monsieur Catulle Mendes has excellently said, is composed "of eternal human imbecility, eternal lust, eternal gluttony, the vileness of instinct magnified into tyranny; of the sense of decency, the virtues, the patriotism & the ideals peculiar to those who have just eaten their fill." Really, these are hardly the constituents for an amusing play, & the masks demonstrate that the comedy must at the most be the macabre comedy of an English clown, or of a Dance of Death. "

― Alfred Jarry , Ubu Roi

13 " ...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 , Days and Nights

14 " 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

15 " Là-dessus, le Père Ubu, qui n’a pas volé son repos, va essayer de dormir. Il croit que le cerveau, dans la décomposition, fonctionne au-delà de la mort et que ce sont ses rêves qui sont le Paradis.

Letter to Madame Rachilde, 1906
http://laguerretotale.blogspot.com/20... "

― Alfred Jarry

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

― Alfred Jarry

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

― Alfred Jarry

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

― Alfred Jarry

19 " Si longue
que soit la vie, elle n’est qu’un long retard de la mort "

― Alfred Jarry

20 " What is a play? A public holiday? A lesson? A pastime? In the first place it might seem that a play ought to be a kind of public holiday, being a show put on for a crowd of citizens gathered together. But we must not forget that there are several different kinds of theater audiences, or at least two: there is the audience of a few intelligent people, and the one that is just a crowd. For the crowd, spectacular shows [...] are mainly a pastime, and maybe just a little bit of a lesson since they are not forgotten quite immediately, but a lesson in mock sentimentality and mock esthetics, which are the only real kind for people like that, and for whom the minority theater seem an incomprehensible bore. This other theater is neither a holiday for its audience, nor a lesson, nor a pastime--it is something real: the elite join in the creation of one of themselves who, among this elite, sees a being come to life in himself that was created by himself: an active pleasure which is God's sole pleasure and which the holiday mob achieves in caricature in the carnal act. "

― Alfred Jarry , Selected Works

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