Eugene Ionesco Quotes

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Once you're alienated, you're on your own. That takes you to the world of the existential, where things just kind of float.

Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.

Philosophers are never happy here. Now is not their time, and here is not their space. They live there, they live somewhere else.

I always felt like an outer-space alien. I was always breaking the fourth wall.

True life is elsewhere

We live on top of the created world, I think to myself, not in it.

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

My thoughts and I were of another world.

That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself: a passer-by in everything, even my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world.

As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.

I was reduced to pure concept. My flesh had dissolved; my form had dissipated. I floated in space. Liberated of my corporeal being, but without dispensation to go anywhere else.I was adrift in the void. Somewhere across the fine line separating nightmare from reality.

I couldn't say who I am, I haven't the remotest notion of myself; I am someone without antecedents, without a history, without a country, and on that I insist!

I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.

Modern man has both feet firmly planted in mid-air

He's worked his entire life and he's never lived a single moment, I mean not a moment, in the real world.

I'm not the same as other people. I don't think the same. I don't do the same things. I just feel out of this world sometimes.

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

I sometimes feel that I am trying to dig in the world around me. I'm involved in another kind of archaeology to look for another kind of truth, and the moment I find, the moment I am separated from that life, the moment I am sort of in a world, every time I have gone out and performed in the, in the cinema for example, if you do two or three films on the trot you suddenly have this impression that you're becoming separate or separated from the world around you.

The world went on, as it does, without my full participation, and I only woke up from the reverie when someone said my name.

I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.

Thank god, I'm not from this world.

I have not loved the world, nor the world me.