Ionesco on Death

Eugène Ionesco.

Eugène Ionesco (pictured) was an influential protagonist of Absurd philosophy. His work—primarily, in drama and theatre—possessed a nightmarish quality that asserted very strongly a basic theme: namely, that beneath everything, the human condition cannot renounce death.

'I have no other images of the world, aside from those which express evanescence and hardness, vanity and anger, nothingness or hideous and useless hate. Existence has continued to appear to me in this way. Everything has only confirmed what I have seen, what I have understood in my childhood: vain and sordid furores, cries suddenly stifled by silence, shadows swallowed up forever in the night.' — Eugène Ionesco (Avant-garde by Leonard C. Pronko)

↑