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The Theater and Its Double QUOTES

The Theater and Its Double QUOTES

1 " All writing is filth "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

2 " Que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous pourrions tout de même voir que c'est notre vénération devant ce qui a été déjà fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit, qui nous pétrifie, qui nous stabilise et nous empêche de prendre contact avec la force qui est dessous, que l'on appelle l'énergie pensante, la force vitale, le déterminisme des échanges, les menstrues de la lune ou tout ce qu'on voudra. "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

3 " If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames. "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

4 " Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all. "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

5 " How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward. "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

6 " I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

7 " If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force. "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

8 " I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames. "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

9 " In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds. "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

10 " The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes; that is the
secret of fascination. And in his book, St Augustine does not doubt the
reality of this fascination for one moment. "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

11 " In the manifested world, metaphysically speaking, evil is the permanent law, and what is good is an effort and already one more cruelty added to the other. "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

12 " The theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice. "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

13 " Sans un élément de cruauté à la base de tout spectacle, le théâtre n'est pas possible. "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

14 " Nous ne sommes pas libres. Et le ciel peut encore nous tomber sur la tête. Et le théâtre est fait pour nous apprendre d'abord cela "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

15 " The theatre will never find itself again except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior. […] If theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything in love, crime, war and madness. "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double

16 " Всякое произведение принадлежит всем эпохам. Не бывает исключительно старой или исключительно новой пьесы — в противном случае это просто какая-нибудь банальная вещь. "

― Antonin Artaud , The Theater and Its Double