Ionesco Quotes & Sayings

There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer. — Eugene Ionesco

I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it. — Eugene Ionesco

I just can't get used to life. — Eugene Ionesco

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing. — Eugene Ionesco

When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them. — Kenneth Tynan

God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself. — Eugene Ionesco

A civil servant doesn't make jokes. — Eugene Ionesco

I am, it seems, an avant-garde dramatist. It would even seem obvious since I am present here at discussions on the avant-garde theatre. It is all entirely official. But what does the term avant-garde mean? — Eugene Ionesco

ANGELFOOD

NNAA NNM NWNWNW V — Eugene Ionesco

People, they all have the word goodness on lips a bloody knife between their teeth. — Eugene Ionesco

Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious. — Eugene Ionesco

Politicians are either there or here or totally at home. Their finitude is more than sufficient unto itself. I don't mean to imply that I'm any better than they which does not mean that they are any better than I. Which doesn't mean anything at all. — Eugene Ionesco

I ought not to have stirred, I was swept into the dance, caught up in the whirling movement of things. Being in Time means running after the present. You run after things, you run with things, you flow away. — Eugene Ionesco

Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out. — Eugene Ionesco

Why was I born, if it wasn't forever? — Eugene Ionesco

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality ... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth ... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is. — Eugene Ionesco

To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying — Eugene Ionesco

We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously — Eugene Ionesco

I thought that it was strange to assume that it was abnormal for anyone to be forever asking questions about the nature of the universe, about what the human condition really was, my condition, what I was doing here, if there was really something to do. It seemed to me, on the contrary, that it was abnormal for people NOT to think about it, for them to allow themselves to live, as it were, unconsciously. Perhaps it's because everyone, all the others, are convinced in some unformulated, irrational way that one day everything will be made clear. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for humanity. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for me. — Eugene Ionesco

The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have the strength to be uncommon. — Eugene Ionesco

I think that Ionesco's greatest weapon is that he's able to make us laugh at the darkest corners of our souls. — Geoffrey Rush

The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity. — Eugene Ionesco

I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a will to renewal. This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of crises - of rupture, repudiation and resistance. When there is no crisis, there is stagnation, petrifaction and death. All thought, all art is aggressive. — Eugene Ionesco

If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think. — Eugene Ionesco

Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. — Eugene Ionesco

Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately. — Eugene Ionesco

The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult. — Eugene Ionesco

A man with a soul is not like every other man. — Eugene Ionesco

It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think — Eugene Ionesco

We need to be virtually bludgeoned into detachment from our daily lives, our habits and mental laziness, which conceal from us the strangeness of the world. Without a fresh virginity of mind, without a new and healthy awareness of existential reality, there can be no theatre and no art either; the real must be in a way dislocated, before it can be re-integrated. — Eugene Ionesco

To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful. — Eugene Ionesco

We haven't the time to take our time. — Eugene Ionesco

All men die in solitude; all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me — Eugene Ionesco

He would say ect. instead of ect., and thus instead of ect., instead of ect. and thus and so forth! — Eugene Ionesco

It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions. — Eugene Ionesco

DAISY: I never knew you were such a realist-I thought you were more poetic. Where's your imagination? There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you. Escape into the world of imagination. — Eugene Ionesco

She has regular features but yet one could not say that she was pretty. She is too big and too stout. Her features are not regular and yet one could say that she is very pretty. She is too small and too thin. She's a voice teacher — Eugene Ionesco

But you'll never become a rhinoceros, really you won't ... you haven't got the vocation! — Eugene Ionesco

Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality. — Eugene Ionesco

The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand myself. — Eugene Ionesco

Truth has only two sides, but it's the third side that's best. — Eugene Ionesco

All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers ... Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about ... Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion. — Eugene Ionesco

Our anxieties were driving us to become other people - he was Earner; I was
Mother, like characters in some phenomenally boring Ionesco play. — Claire Dederer

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation. — Eugene Ionesco

An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system. — Eugene Ionesco

I am not capitulating. — Eugene Ionesco

The human comedy does not attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world. I am from elsewhere, and it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls ... but where is it? — Eugene Ionesco

You can only predict things after they have happened. — Eugene Ionesco

To tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a real bludgeon blow. — Eugene Ionesco

If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. — Eugene Ionesco

Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth. — Eugene Ionesco

If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper. — Eugene Ionesco

What's chivalrous about saying you've seen a rhinoceros? — Eugene Ionesco

It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand. — Eugene Ionesco

Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality. — Eugene Ionesco

For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; asthough there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart. — Eugene Ionesco

Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means; a complexity of words, movements, gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way. — Eugene Ionesco

It is true that all authors have tried to make propaganda. The great ones are those who failed, who have gained access, consciously or not, to a deeper and more universal reality. — Eugene Ionesco

In the name of religion, one tortures, persecutes, builds pyres. In the guise of ideologies, one massacres, tortures and kills. In the name of justice one punishes ... in the name of love of one's country or of one's race hates other countries, despises them, massacres them. In the name of equality and brotherhood there is suppression and torture. There is nothing in common between the means and the end, the means go far beyond the end ... ideologies and religion ... are the alibis of the means. — Eugene Ionesco

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. — Eugene Ionesco

I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night. — Eugene Ionesco

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff. — Eugene Ionesco

The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register. — Eugene Ionesco

Dreams are reality at its most profound. — Eugene Ionesco

A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship. — Eugene Ionesco

We have not the time to take our time. — Eugene Ionesco

The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue. — Eugene Ionesco

Only the ephemeral is of lasting value. — Eugene Ionesco

Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer. — Eugene Ionesco

I've always been suspicious of collective truths. — Eugene Ionesco

Do rhinoceroses cough? — Eugene Ionesco

Last House offended a lot of people. The results in the theaters, even in Boston, reminded me a bit of things from when I was studying theater of the absurd, and the rise and the appearance of Ionesco plays, and things like that. Thinking, "My God, people actually are getting into fistfights. People are having heart attacks. People are actually trying to get into the projection booth to destroy the print." — Wes Craven

I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old. — Eugene Ionesco

When I was born, I was almost fourteen years old. That's why I was able to understand more easily than most what it was all about. — Eugene Ionesco

Oh righteous doom, that they who make Pleasure their only end, Ordering the whole life for its sake, Miss that whereto they tend. While they who bid stern duty lead, Content to follow, they, Of duty only taking heed, Find pleasure by the way. — Eugene Ionesco

MR. SMITH: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. [Silence.]
MR. MARTIN: Don't you feel well? [Silence.]
MRS. SMITH: No, he's wet his pants. [Silence.]
MRS. MARTIN: Oh, sir, at your age, you shouldn't. [Silence.]
MR. SMITH: The heart is ageless. [Silence.] — Eugene Ionesco

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician. — Eugene Ionesco

Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches. — Eugene Ionesco

Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing. — Eugene Ionesco

The critic should describe, and not prescribe. — Eugene Ionesco

A person who has not completely lost the memory of paradise, even though it is a faint one, will suffer endlessly. He will feel the call of the essential world, will hear the voice that comes from so far away that one cannot find out where it comes from, a voice that cannot guide him. — Eugene Ionesco

Logic is a very beautiful thing. As long as it is not abused. — Eugene Ionesco

People who don't read are brutes. — Eugene Ionesco

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water. — Eugene Ionesco

Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic. — Eugene Ionesco

As soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over ... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth. — Eugene Ionesco

I started writing for the theatre because I hated it. — Eugene Ionesco

I don't believe in seeing evil in everything. I leave that to the inquisitors. — Eugene Ionesco

That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide. — Eugene Ionesco

Rhinoceros The Leader The Future is in Eggs or It Takes all Sorts to Make a World — Eugene Ionesco

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them. — Eugene Ionesco

The fact that I despise religion doesn't mean I don't esteem it highly. — Eugene Ionesco

In the history of humanity there are no civilizations or cultures which fail to manifest, in one or a thousand ways, this need for an absolute that is called heaven, freedom, a miracle, a lost paradise to be regained, peace, the going beyond History ... There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation ... Humanity has always had a nostalgia for the freedom that is only beauty, that is only real; life, plenitude, light. — Eugene Ionesco

I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding.
If I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically, I should say that the truest society, the authentic human community, is extra-social - a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa. — Eugene Ionesco

I am sad when I think that the years go by like sacks that we mark "Returned Empty," sad when I think that we shall be separated from one another and from ourselves. — Eugene Ionesco

A work of art really is above all an adventure of the mind. — Eugene Ionesco

Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht ) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them. — Eugene Ionesco

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. — Eugene Ionesco

I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again. — Eugene Ionesco

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? — Eugene Ionesco