Eugene Ionesco Dream Quotations

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to ''realize'' myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have ''succeeded,'' this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is ''realizable.'' Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

I am told, in a dream ... you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream.

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is.

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.

There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.

Dreams are reality at its most profound.

I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.