Eugène Ionesco - Death Quotes

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Beckett shows death; his people are in dustbins or waiting for God. (Beckett will be cross with me for mentioning God, but never mind.) Similarly, in my play The New Tenant, there is no speech, or rather, the speeches are given to the Janitor. The Tenant just suffocates beneath proliferating furniture and objects — which is a symbol of death. There were no longer words being spoken, but images being visualized. We achieved it above all by the dislocation of language. … Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words.

Eugène Ionesco

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.

Eugène Ionesco

My work has been essentially a dialogue with death, asking him, Why? Why? So only death can silence me. Only death can close my lips.

Eugène Ionesco

All history is nothing but a succession of 'crises' – of rupture, repudiation and resistance... When there is no 'crisis', there is stagnation, petrification and death.

Eugène Ionesco