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The Theater and Its Double
Antonin Artaud
Top 10 Best 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.”
“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.”
“I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself”
“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.”
“I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.”
“All writing is filth”
“In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.”
“If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.”
“The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes; that is the secret of fascination. And in his book, St Augustine does not doubt the reality of this fascination for one moment.”
“In the manifested world, metaphysically speaking, evil is the permanent law, and what is good is an effort and already one more cruelty added to the other.”
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Book Keywords:
flames, magic-observation, form, theatre, culture, life, passion, martyrdom, writing, formalism, theater, art