Eugene Ionesco
Eugene Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco; 26 November 1909 – 28 March 1994) was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and one of the foremost figures of the French Avant-garde theatre. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict the solitude and insignificance of human existence in a tangible way...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth26 November 1909
CountryFrance
writing theatre hated
I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.
hate night vanity
I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.
country hate mean
In the name of religion, one tortures, persecutes, builds pyres. In the guise of ideologies, one massacres, tortures and kills. In the name of justice one punishes...in the name of love of one's country or of one's race hates other countries, despises them, massacres them. In the name of equality and brotherhood there is suppression and torture. There is nothing in common between the means and the end, the means go far beyond the end...ideologies and religion... are the alibis of the means.
Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, eveything that will be has been.
emotional explain fall hunger initial jealousy marx necessity
Marx was wrong; jealousy and pride, emotional forces, are just as responsible as hunger and necessity for our actions; they explain the whole of History, and the initial fall of man.
ancient becomes breath hot idiom imagery language larger magic people saying unchanging
Idiom is larger than geography; it is the hot breath of a people singing, slashing, explorative. Imagery becomes the magic denominator, the language of a passage, saying the ancient unchanging particulars.
attempt claims dream history humbug reality simply stops truer
There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to ''realize'' myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have ''succeeded,'' this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is ''realizable.'' Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.
behind hide men symptom
Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their clichTs.
confusion function identify nowadays people society tempted today unpleasant
The unpleasant thing about society today is nowadays is that there is a confusion between people and their function; or rather, people are tempted to identify with the function they perform. This is what's happening, particularly in totalitarian soc
life-and-death forever born
Why was I born, if it wasn't forever?
trying despair way
Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.
ridiculous certain mankind
It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind,
illusions-of-grandeur people triviality
Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
distance moving space
The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.