Antonin Artaud

“Estoy en el punto donde ya no toco a la vida, pero tengo en mí todos los apetitos y la titilación insistente del ser. Sólo tengo una ocupación: rehacerme.”

“Nel suo pensiero io sono l'ago che scorre, ed è la sua anima che accetta l'ago e l'accoglie.”

“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.”

“Those who live, live off the dead.”

“I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason. I have found levels in the realm of the nerve. I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves...”

“So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastiness.”

“[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.”

“This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.No, van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were bursts of Greek fire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision would have been capable of seriously upsetting the spectral conformity of thebourgeoisie.In comparison with the lucidity of van Gogh, psychiatry is no better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling states of anguish and human suffocation but a ridiculous terminology. To a man, this whole gang of pected scoundrels and patented quacks are all erotomaniacs.”

“- Usted se conoce pero lo vemos, vemos perfectamente lo que hace.- Sí, pero ustedes no ven mi pensamiento.”

“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.”

“Postoji u meni nešto užasno, što raste i što ne potiče od mene samog, već iz mrakova koje nosim u sebi, što potiče odande gde čovekova duša ne zna gde počinje a gde se završava njegovo Ja, niti šta ga je nateralo da započne onako kako misli da je započeo.”

“I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.”

“The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

“And war is wonderful, isn't it?For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step.In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides.”

“When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.”

“I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.”

“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself, but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”

“VERBLUEFFENDE ENTDECKUNG. HIMMEL PHYSIKALISCH VERNICHTET. ERDE NUR EINE MINUTE VON SIRIUS ENTFERNT! KEIN FIRMAMENT MEHR.”

“I myself am an absolute abyss.”

“Not only are mortals rotten, the very atmosphere in which we live is materially and physically rotten, swarming with maggots, with obscene appearances, poisonous minds, and foul organisms.”

“Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.”

“A host of scorpions crawl out from under the wetnurse's dress and start swarming in her vagina which swells and splits, becomes transparent and shimmers like the sun”

“There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel”

“Vivir no es otra cosa que arder en preguntas.”

“... not once more will/I be found with beings/who swallowed the rail of life//And one day I found myself with beings/who swallowed the nail of life/-as soon as I lost my matrix mamma,//and the being twisted under him,/and god poured me back to her/(the motherfucker)...”

“It is the very reason-for-being of language and grammar that Iunhinge.”

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

“All writing is rubbish. People who try to free themselves from what is vague in order to state precisely whatever is going on in their minds are producing rubbish. The whole literary tribe is a pack of rubbish mongers, especially today. All those who have landmarks in their minds, I mean in a certain part of their heads, in well-defined sites in their skulls, all those who are masters of language, all those for whom words have meaning, all those for whom the soul has its heights and thought its currents, those who are the spirits of the times, and who have given names to these currents of thought—I am thinking of their specific tasks, and of that mechanical creaking their minds produce at every gust of wind—are rubbish mongers.”

“We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.”

“I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.”

“All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs. ”

“I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.”

“I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.”

“All writing is filth”

“I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself”

“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.”

“No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”

“I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.”

“For nothing bestializes a being like the taste for eternal happiness, the search for eternal happiness at any price, and mademoiselle Lucifer is that slut who never wanted to abandon eternal happiness.”

“There is in every madmana misunderstood geniuswhose ideashining in his headfrightened peopleand for whom delirium was the only solutionto the strangulationthat life had prepared for him.”

“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.”