Eugene Ionesco Quotes

Everything that comes together falls apart.

But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.

Just when normal life felt almost possible - when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed. They learned, somehow, to wait those times out. There was no cure, no answer, no reparation. (161)

It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others.

What is this world? A mere curl of smoke for the wind to scatter.

We're just a bubble in a boiling pot.

As for success, I don't care for it. It is a fragile thing.

Alas for the affairs of men! When they are fortunate you might compare them to a shadow; and if they are unfortunate, a wet sponge with one dash wipes the picture away.

I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

This world's a bubble.

I'm not sure whether Los Angeles borders on the ocean or on oblivion. I always feel that I'm two steps away from the other side when I'm out there. It's more like a vacation place or a place to visit than a place to hunker down.

That's the nature of this business. Something that took ten years to make can crumble in an instant. It could be snatched away from you at any moment.

Sometimes you think things are going to be forever, and then... of course, they're not.

Anything that's given to you can be taken away from you at any time.

Fame is an illusion. Things can be given to you quite easily, but they get ripped away so quickly as well.

You can't even stand without risking to fall.

It was becoming clear to me that I shouldn't bother to get too attached to anything. Turn your back and you lose it. Just like that.

The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The destruction of Troy. The fall of the petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence - that is beautiful.

The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorageis quicksand.

Waves of hands, hesitations at street corners, someone dropping a cigarette into the gutter-all are stories. But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for some one to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then an· other I do not cling to life. I shall be brushed like a bee from a sunflower. My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.

Since the past is unreal and the future is unreal, all your thoughts are about nothing.

Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life is beyond our capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.

All human things hang on a slender thread, the strongest fall with a sudden crash.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

Nothing is taken care of forever.