I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
Antonin ArtaudRead
The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Theater is a dynamic art form that reflects life and evokes deep emotional responses.
In this quote, Antonin Artaud emphasizes the power of theater to engage with the complexities of life. He suggests that true theater does not merely entertain but also provokes thought and emotion, using actors as living instruments to explore and portray the struggles and nuances of existence.
Themes
TheaterArtLifeEmotionActors
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the significance of theater in society, this quote can be used to illustrate how theater reflects deeper truths about human existence.
More from Antonin Artaud
All quotes →Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
Antonin ArtaudRead
I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.
Antonin ArtaudRead
If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.
Antonin ArtaudRead
It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.
Antonin ArtaudRead
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .
Antonin ArtaudRead
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