The Theater and Its Double Quotes

“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.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“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.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“All writing is filth”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“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.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“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.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“Sans un élément de cruauté à la base de tout spectacle, le théâtre n'est pas possible.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double