166 Quotes by Eugene Ionesco

The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.

All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.

We haven't the time to take out time.

I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old.

Dreams are reality at its most profound.

I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.

When silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate "why," that great "why" is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out...