Antonin Artaud: Quotes about life

Antonin Artaud was French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director. Explore interesting quotes on life.

Antonin Artaud: 88 quotes23 likes

“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.”

Source: The Theater and Its Double

“You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief?… We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone.”

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

“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.”

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

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

Source: The Theater and Its Double

“When we speak the word “life,” it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.”

Preface: The Theater and Culture
The Theatre and Its Double (1938, translated 1958)

“Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.”

Quoted in the memoirs of Jean-Louis Barrault, The Grenier des Grands-Augustins, pt. 2, Memories for Tomorrow (1972, trans. 1974).

“The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything—gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness—rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations…. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.”

Preface: The Theater and Culture
The Theatre and Its Double (1938, translated 1958)

“The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.”

The Theatre of Cruelty, in The Theory of the Modern Stage (ed. Eric Bentley) (1968).

“Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.”

Lee Jamieson, Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice, Greenwich Exchange, 2007, p. 23.