Quotes by Eugene Ionesco

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

“Yes, I now feel that it was then on that evening of sweet dreams- that the very first dawn of human love burst upon the icy night of my spirit. Since that period I have never seen nor heard your name without a shiver half of delight, half of anxiety.”

“I dreamed a thousand new paths. . . I woke and walked my old one.”

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

“Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.”

“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 awar”

“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.”

“Youve always made the mistake of being yourself”

“We have not the time to take our time.”

“Living is abnormal.”

“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.”

Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means a complexity of words movements gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.

You can only predict things after theyve happened.

Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Culture cannot be separated from politics. The arts, philosophy and metaphysics, religion and the sciences, constitute culture. Politics are the science or art of organizing our relationships to allow for the development of life in society.

When I was nine, the teacher asked us to write a piece about our village fete. He read mine in class. I was encouraged and continued. I even wanted to write my memoirs at the age of ten. At twelve I wrote poetry, mostly about friendship - Ode to Friendship. Then my class wanted to make a film, and one little boy suggested that I write the script.

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.

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.