Eugène Ionesco > Quotes

“That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.”
― Eugène Ionesco, Man With Bags

“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”
― 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

“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. ”
― Eugene Ionesco

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

“I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.”
― Eugène Ionesco

“I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.”
― Eugène Ionesco, Man With Bags

“Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.”
― Eugène 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

“People who don't read are brutes.”
― 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 still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old.”
― Eugène Ionesco

“A work of art really is above all an adventure of the mind.”
― Eugene Ionesco

“Tous les chats sont mortels. Socrate est mortel. Donc Socrate est un chat.”
― Eugène Ionesco, Rhinocéros

“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

“Solitude seems to oppress me. And so does the company of other people.”
― Eugène Ionesco, Rhinoceros and Other Plays

“Living is abnormal.”
― Eugène Ionesco

“Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name?

~Jack or The Submission”
― Eugene Ionesco, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson: Two Plays

“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.”
― Eugène 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.”
― Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes

“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, Rhinoceros and Other Plays

“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

“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

“BERENGER: And you consider all this natural?



DUDARD: What could be more natural than a rhinoceros? 



BERENGER: Yes, but for a man to turn into a rhinoceros is abnormal beyond question.



DUDARD: Well, of course, that's a matter of opinion ... 



BERENGER: It is beyond question, absolutely beyond question!


DUDARD: You seem very sure of yourself. Who can say where the normal stops and the abnormal begins? Can you personally define these conceptions of normality and abnormality? Nobody has solved this problem yet, either medically or philosophically. You ought to know that. 



BERENGER: The problem may not be resolved philosophically -- but in practice it's simple. They may prove there's no such thing as movement ... and then you start walking ... [he starts walking up and down the room] ... and you go on walking, and you say to yourself, like Galileo, 'E pur si muove' ... 



DUDARD: You're getting things all mixed up! Don't confuse the issue. In Galileo's case it was the opposite: theoretic and scientific thought proving itself superior to mass opinion and dogmatism. 



BERENGER: [quite lost] What does all that mean? Mass opinion, dogmatism -- they're just words! I may be mixing everything up in my head but you're losing yours. You don't know what's normal and what isn't any more. I couldn't care less about Galileo ... I don't give a damn about Galileo. 



DUDARD: You brought him up in the first place and raised the whole question, saying that practice always had the last word. Maybe it does, but only when it proceeds from theory! The history of thought and science proves that.

BERENGER: [more and more furious] It doesn't prove anything of the sort! It's all gibberish, utter lunacy!



DUDARD: There again we need to define exactly what we mean by lunacy ... 



BERENGER: Lunacy is lunacy and that's all there is to it! Everybody knows what lunacy is. And what about the rhinoceroses -- are they practice or are they theory?”
― Eugène Ionesco, Rhinoceros / The Chairs / The Lesson

“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.”
― Eugène Ionesco

“You can only predict things after they have happened.”
― Eugène 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.”
― Eugène Ionesco, The Hermit

“I've always been suspicious of collective truths".”
― Eugène Ionesco

“Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.”
― Eugène Ionesco

“I'd rather lay an egg in a box than go and steal an ox.”
― Eugène Ionesco, The Bald Soprano: & Other Plays