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excerpts · Formerly people used to go to Paris to learn law; now they learn it in prison. · The newborn boy now must have four hands: one for the cigarette, one for the playing cards, a third one for the latest ointment, and the fourth for the ball and cue. · Since the

One fair day the sultan walked about his cityPlain in dress, together with his high vizier. On the spot he noticed lying in the gutterA dime which he, stooping, picked up in great haste. The vizier, who witnessed this parsimonyMade so bold in asking of his majesty:'Please

CANTO THE TENTHArgument Considering the counsel vainOf all the rank and file, The Gypsies chose those of schooled brainTo gather for a whileAnd judge what government is goodFor the entire Gypsihood.  1Now when the maw is well provided for,The mouth is ready and the tongue

There is an old Romanian saying – Romanians are born poets. Judging by the amount of poetry produced in Romania in the past two centuries, there may be more to it than mere preconception. But although one may discover a fair number of gems upon reading it, and critics

Modernism has brought to paroxysm the need of personal mythologies, immanent to Western civilization. No wonder that some of the heroes and saints of the avant-garde came from those peripheral European territories still uncharted from a spiritual point of view. By the beginning

Simplicity is not an end in art, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, in approaching the real sense of things. Simplicity is at bottom complexity and one must be nourished on its essence to understand its significance. Catalog of Brâncuşi exhibition, Brummer

UNDER THE QUESTION MARK: MAN If you were asked to portray yourself as you did in your books, diaries, or in Present Past, Past Present, how would you introduce yourself? Eugène IONESCO: It is very complicated. I don't know. I don't know who I am. I don't

The founder of the Theater of the Absurd (with The Bald Soprano, staged in 1950 by Nicolas Bataille at the Theatre des Noctambules in Paris, a play he had begun in the 40s while still in Romania under the title English without a Teacher), a member of the French Academy from

Honestly, Corneille bores me. We probably only love him (without believing in him) out of habit. We are forced to. They imposed him on us in school. I cannot stand Schiller. For a long time I thought Marivaux' plays were unserious games. Musset's comedies are thin,

Not thinking about anything. Only thinking of petty little things. Not thinking about the Whole. Thinking about everything and nothing. Thinking about petty little nothings. And, if I can, I think that God thinks me, thinking under God's protection. Is God there? Does

Very few people think: very few in comparison with the nation. And which is more, as these thinkers are kept far away from the lofty secrets of politics, from the lofty secrets of science and research, and from the lofty secrets of the police and of those who secretly run

Sometimes I happen to have beautiful utopian dreams. Sometimes I dream that it was not Lenin in that sealed car crossing Germany and going to Russia in 1917, rather there were three or four odious American capitalists: Russia, Europe would have been saved. Imagine all those