Alfred Jarry > Quotes

“Dawn was breaking, like the light from another world.”
― Alfred Jarry, The Supermale

“It is one of the great joys of home ownership to fire a pistol in one's own bedroom”
― Alfred Jarry

“It is conventional to call ''monster'' any blending of dissonant elements. I call ''monster'' every original inexhaustible beauty.”
― Alfred Jarry

“That's a beautiful speech, but nobody's listening. Let's go.”
― Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi

“The work of art is a stuffed crocodile.”
― Alfred Jarry

“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

“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

“...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

“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

“God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.”
― Alfred Jarry, Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician

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

-After shooting into a mirror”
― Alfred Jarry

“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

“...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

“JARRY: (To audience) As to the action which is about to begin, it takes place in Poland - that is to say, nowhere.”
― Alfred Jarry

“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

“Simplicity does not need to be simple. Instead it should be forged of complexity that has been compressed and synthesized.”
― Alfred Jarry

“The military hospital is the most cheerful of militaty buildings because there are so few uniforms inside.”
― Alfred Jarry

“Papa Ubu: Captain Bordure, I've decided to make you Duke of Lithuania.”
― Alfred Jarry

“If I ever meet him in a dark alley he'll have one hell of a fifteen minutes.”
― Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi

“Merdre !”
― Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi

“Si longue
que soit la vie, elle n’est qu’un long retard de la mort”
― Alfred Jarry

“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

“As to the action which is about to begin, it takes place in Poland – that is to say, nowhere”
― Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi

“Ah, crap! Isn't Wrong worth the same as Right?”
― Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi

“He's not a man, he's a machine.”
― Alfred Jarry, The Supermale

“The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character. It is obvious that Hamlet, say, is more alive than the man in the street, being both more complicated and more integrated, and perhaps he is the only one really alive, for he is a walking abstraction. Therefore it is harder for the mind to create a character than for matter create a man; and if we are absolutely incapable of creating and giving birth to a new being, then we would do better to keep quiet.”
― Alfred Jarry, Selected Works

“To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a "mummified" form.”
― Alfred Jarry, Selected Works

“Just as the poppy and the dandelion are scythed down in the flower of their youth by the pitiless scythe of the pitiless scyther who pitilessly scythes their pitiful pans, so poor Renski has played the pretty poppy’s pitiful part.”
― Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi

“O! cette ville n’est remarquable que parce qu’elle est composée de maisons comme toutes les villes et que toutes ses maisons ressemblent à toutes les maisons! ...pas curious du tout / La vérité me force? Nous sommes les hommes libres! Nous devons donc désobéir, même à la vérité.”
― Alfred Jarry, Ubu enchaîné

“It is fine to live two different moments of time as one: that alone allows one to live authentically a single moment of eternity, indeed all eternity since it has no moments. It is as earth-shattering as Shakespeare's shock would be, presumably, were he to revisit some Stratford-on-Avon museum and discover that they were still exhibiting his "skull at the age of five." It is the jubilation of God the Father, one Being made two in his Son, and the perception the first term has of its relationship with the second term was bound to create nothing less than the Holy Spirit. The present, possessing its past in the heart of another, lives at the same time its Self and its Self plus something. If a moment of the past or a moment of the present existed separately at one point in time, it would not perceive this Plus something which is quite simply the Act of Perception. This act is, for the sentient being, the most profound enjoyment conceivable, one that is different from the sexual acts of brutes like you and me.”
― Alfred Jarry, Days And Nights