2
" I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot. "
― Eugène Ionesco , Fragments of a Journal
3
" Nothing is mightier than our why, nothing stands above it, because in the end there is a why to which no answer is possible. In fact, from why to why, from one step to the next, you get to the end of things. And it is only by travelling from one why to the next, as far as the why that is unanswerable, that man attains the level of the creative principle, facing the infinite, equal to the infinite maybe. So long as he can answer the why he gets lost, he loses his way among things. 'Why this?' I answer, 'because that," and from one explanation to the next I reach the point where no explanation is satisfying, from one explanation to the next I reach zero, the absolute, where truth and falsehood are equivalent, become equal to one another, are identified with one another, cancel each other out in face of the absolute nothing. And so we can understand how all action, all choice, all history is justified, at the end of time, by a final cancelling-out. The why goes beyond everything. Nothing goes beyond the why, not even the nothing, because the nothing is not the explanation; when silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate why, that great why is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out, there is nothing more to make out. "
― Eugène Ionesco , Fragments of a Journal
4
" But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I know all that, I shall only have learnt how to get along after a fashion in the enormous gaol, the oppressive prison in which I am held. What a farce, what a snare, what a booby-trap. We were born cheated. For if we are not to know, if there is nothing to know, why do we have this longing to know? "
― Eugène Ionesco , Fragments of a Journal
7
" Eroarea lui André Breton este,poate,de a se fi luat prea în serios.Trebuie să te iei doar puțin în serios,altminteri totul e inconsistent.Dar dacă te iei prea în serios,nu mai există libertate,e gata pușcăria,strangularea.Nu mai ai cu adevărat "libertate de mișcare".Nu te mai miști,ești prins,ești una cu lucrurile,nu mai ai distanța necesară de a vedea clar.Trebuie să fii numai pe jumătate serios. "
― Eugène Ionesco , Fragments of a Journal
8
" Ceea ce se poate cunoaște din fiecare e,în primul rand,politețea,reținerea sa.Nu trebuie mers mai departe,am cădea în abis.Pe cine ai ucis tu,fie numai în gand,tu care ești îmbrăcat în haine de duminică?Și tu,drăguțo,cate ființe ai vrut să ucizi,pe cine ai mai vrea să ucizi,ai vrea să mă pun la dispoziția ta ca să distrug viețile care te deranjează?.. Din moment ce lumea nu e un paradis,nu poate fi decat un infern,afară doar dacă n-a nimicit dorințele.Unde există dorință,există eșec al dorinței,nemulțumire,infern.Cine nu dorește totul,chiar neștiind că nu dorește totul? Lumea nu îmi aparține,nimic și nimeni nu ne aparține:cine are înțelepciunea să accepte asta cu toată inima,cine acceptă să nu posede nimic?Visez la niște campioni alergători care,la semnalul de pornire în cursă,s-ar invita unul pe altul politicos:"După dumneavoastră,domnule,treceți primul.- Nu,nici nu mă gandesc,după dumneavoastră.. "
― Eugène Ionesco , Fragments of a Journal
14
" Ever since I was fifteen, that is to say from that moment when I lost all that was left me of my childhood, from the moment when I ceased to be aware of the present and knew only the past hurrying into the future, that is to say into the abyss, ever since I became fully conscious of time I have felt old and I have wanted to live. I have run after life as though to catch time, and I have tried to live. I have run after life so much that it has always escaped me, I have run, I have never been late and never too early, and yet I have never caught up with it: it is as though I have run alongside of it.
What is life, I may be asked. For me, life is not Time; it is not this state of existence, for ever escaping us, slipping between our fingers and vanishing like a ghost as soon as you try to grasp it. For me it is, it must be, the present, presentness, plenitude. I have run after life so much that I have lost it. "
― Eugène Ionesco , Fragments of a Journal
