166 Quotes by Eugene Ionesco

To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying

There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.

People who don't read are brutes.

It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.

The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.

Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.

The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.

I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.