Antonin Artaud Quotes

We have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree.

There's some things I can't write about, just terrible personal tragedies.

Suffering has roused them from the sleep of gentle life, and every day fills them with a terrible intoxication. They are now something more than themselves; those we loved were merely happy shadows.

I hated my whole childhood, hated it, hated it, hated it. There was no place for me.

I had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.

To live is to feel oneself lost.

Trauma and pain and suffering can be the very thing that dislodges a person from themselves both in awful ways and larger ways that force one to reckon with one's own life.

It was one of those times when you can feel the air in a room. Everything stood still. I can remember the T-shirt I was wearing and the bag I was carrying. I don't think I breathed for 15 minutes. It was a devastating moment. They said they wanted me to experience more things. OK. I began contemplating things. Maybe I should take LSD or become a hooker. I left Juilliard and was just meandering and drifting for a while. Thank God I had support from my family and close friends. Bad times.

...we're told by TV and Reader's Digest that a crisis will trigger massive personal change--and that those big changes will make the pain worthwhile. But from what he could see, big change almost never happens. People simply feel lost. They have no idea what to say or do or feel or think. they become messes and tend to remain messes.

I remembered the pain as clearly as if I were shifting — the pain of loss. I felt the agony of the single moment that I lost myself. Lost what made me Sam. The part of me that could remember Grace's name.

I remember there was someone. Someone to love. Someone to hate. And I was something. Something special. And proud of it. For a time. Then they turned on me. He turned on me. I remember . . . dying.

If sinners where so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?

I've been having a midlife crisis since I was four years old.

I feel like what I have become is halfway between my mother and my father, violent and impulsive and desperate and afraid. I feel like I have lost control of what I have become.

I kept asking myself if I felt different, if I was different. The answer was always yes. I was no longer nothing… How odd, I thought; it had taken my mother’s death, Father Quinel’s murder, and the desire of others to kill me to claim a life of my own.

Behind my work was ambition, behind my love was personality, behind my purity was fear, behind my guidance the thirst for power. Now they are vanishing and I drift. I come, Mother, I come, in Thy warm bosom, floating wheresoever Thou takest me, in the voiceless, in the strange, in the wonderland, I come - a spectator, no more an actor.

It is only in the depths of crisis and despair that the fear of losing one's personality breeds millennial hopes of rescue: otherwise, complacency prevails.

I am the outcast come home to roost and the eggs of tomorrow are incubating in my fame. You hate me, you love me, you made me, and now I am in you. I am like that disease brewing in your loins and I think you like it.

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

I felt like I was literally losing myself as being the joyful, spiritual, passionate, exciting woman that I naturally had been.

I've known both misery and happiness, lived in so many different skins it is impossible for one skin to claim me. And I have felt like a wayfarer on an alien planet at times - walking, running, wondering about what brought me to this particular place, and why. But once I was here the dreams started moving in, and I went about devouring them as they devoured me.

I didn’t know how I could live with that knowledge, without it eating me up, without it poisoning every happy memory I had of growing up. Without it ruining everything Beck and I had. I didn’t understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him?

Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable.

This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.