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When I was born, I was almost fourteen years old. That's why I was able to understand more easily than most what it was all about.
EUGENE IONESCO, Jack, or The Submission
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
EUGENE IONESCO, Notes and Counter Notes
I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.
EUGENE IONESCO, Notes and Counter Notes
We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.
EUGENE IONESCO, Present Past / Past Present
Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name!
EUGENE IONESCO, Jack, or The Submission
A person who has not completely lost the memory of paradise, even though it is a faint one, will suffer endlessly. He will feel the call of the essential world, will hear the voice that comes from so far away that one cannot find out where it comes from, a voice that cannot guide him.
EUGENE IONESCO, Present Past / Past Present
You can only predict things after they have happened.
EUGENE IONESCO, Rhinoceros
Beauty is a precarious 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. Often it seems to me to be an evil flower of nothingness, or else the cry of the world as it dies, or a desperate, sumptuous prayer.
EUGENE IONESCO, Present Past / Past Present
If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think.
EUGENE IONESCO, Notes and Counter Notes
A civil servant doesn't make jokes.
EUGENE IONESCO, The Killer
The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.
EUGENE IONESCO, Present Past / Past Present
For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.
EUGÈNE IONESCO, Notes and Counter-Notes
There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
EUGENE IONESCO, Rhinoceros
Childhood is the world of miracle or of magic: it is as if creation rose luminously out of the night, all new and fresh and astonishing. Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing. When the world gives you a feeling of "déjà vu," when you are used to existence, you become an adult.
EUGENE IONESCO, Present Past / Past Present
The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.
EUGENE IONESCO, Present Past / Past Present
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