123 Quotes by Antonin Artaud

Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.

I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.

So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastiness.

It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.

These terrifying forms which advance on me, I feel that the despair they bring is alive. It slips into this nucleus of life beyond which the paths of eternity extend. It is truly an eternal separation. They slip their knives into this center where I feel myself a man, they sever those vital ties which bind me to the dream of my lucid reality.

And 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.

And war is wonderful, isn't it? For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step. In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides.

By suicide I introduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will ... now I choose the direction of my thought and the direction of my faculties, my tendencies, my reality.

When I think about myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new space. I am on the moon as others are on their balconies. I participate in planetary gravitation in the fissures of my mind.