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The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything

more quotes from Antonin Artaud

And what is an authentic madman? It is 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. 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 nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.

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With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.

more quotes from Antonin Artaud

So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.

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There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.

more quotes from Antonin Artaud

It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.

more quotes from Antonin Artaud

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

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There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

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And the serial continues: Pain, expiation, delight, more pain,...

more quotes from John Ashbery

Extreme patience and persistence are required, Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed...

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And of the other things death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.

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We are happy in our way of life. It doesn't make much sense to others. We sit about, Read, and are restless.

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For what Is remarkable about our chronic reverie (a watch...

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But it is the same thing we are all seeing, Our world. Go after it,...

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And suddenly, to be dying Is not a little or mean or cheap thing, Only wearying, the heat unbearable ...

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With all of my power of living I am forced to lie on the floor.

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So we may never Again feel fully confident of the stratagem that bore us...

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For these are moments only, moments of insight, And there are reaches to be attained,...

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Another time I go outside Into the world. It rocks on and on. It was rocking before I saw it And is presumably doing so still.

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Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living. The night is cold and delicate and full of angels...

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