Absurdist Quotes

So many American plays are about family. When you're in the first part of your life, you write about family a lot. I find with my absurdist plays that I was actually writing about my family, but so disguised I didn't realize it myself. ~ Christopher Durang

But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive. ~ Albert Camus

The final conclusion of the absurdist protest is, in fact, the rejection of suicide and persistence in that hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silence of the universe. ~ Albert Camus

I think absurdist humor is funny ... ~ Aziz Ansari

I love the absurd - kind of absurdist comedy, absurd things in life. ~ Rose McGowan

I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe. ~ Nicholas Royle

Before I speak, I have something important to say. ~ Groucho Marx

Since I came at 'Godot' from a God-based frame of mind, it didn't strike me as absurdist. It struck me as characters waiting for proof of God's existence. ~ Michael Schultz

Like the playwrights of the Absurd, Woolrich recognized that a senseless story best mirrors a senseless existence. ~ Francis M. Nevins Jr.

Long before the Theater of the Absurd, Woolrich discovered that an incomprehensible universe is best reflected in an incomprehensible story.
("Introduction") ~ Francis M. Nevins Jr.

The final conclusion of absurdist reasoning is, in fact, the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe. Suicide would mean the end of this encounter, and absurdist reasoning considers that it could not consent to this without negating its own premises. ~ Albert Camus

My bones always crack. Sometimes, I like to imagine that one day, my back will split open, and beautiful wings will emerge. ~ Khloe Beutler

Every well-thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote. ~ George Sanders

I think I'm more of an absurdist than a satirist. I think I'm more of a - humanist? I hate to say it! ~ Mike White

Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier? ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

Personally I always preferred Lipton's. ~ Samuel Beckett

The absurdist is concerned with the search for meaning in the Universe. He believes this search to be meaningless
hence the disintegration of plot, character, and language in absurdist drama. Order is a falsehood that we, God, those who came before us, have imposed on a random universe. However, the absurdist is confronted with a curious paradox: though he believes the Universe to be meaningless, he cannot abandon the search for meaning
or he will die. ~ Walter Wykes

Extremely self-conscious in its craft, in many ways The Hand of Ethelberta is an exploration of fiction as illusion, which involves parody of the conventions it employs; romance, melodrama and farce, and a rejection of realism for absurdist and surrealistic effects. The 'hand' of Ethelberta is an obvious, ironic allusion to courtship, and the sub-title, 'A Comedy in Chapters', suggests the novel's affinity with the conventions of Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy of manners. ~ Geoffrey Harvey

Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape.
Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, it the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? The case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with lime, fertilizer, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much. ~ Michael Pollan

Hackle may be the best absurdist story writer working today. ~ Bradley Sands

Are you an evolutionist?
I'm an absurdist, ma'am. But let's suppose evolution is true; what about the monkeys today? Why can't we see them evolving? Are they still evolving? ~ Harrison Wheeler

Television wasn't getting rid of animals, but they were no longer cast as creatures that were omniscient and heroic. They were talking horses like Mr Ed or an absurdist pig like Arnold Ziffle ... Just like the heroic animals in silent films became comedians in talkies, animals on television were becoming jesters, something Rin Tin Tin had never been. ~ Susan Orlean

Since I was both an atheist and an absurdist, I had decided that the most absurd thing I could do would be to develop an intimate relationship with the God I didn't believe in. ~ Paul Krassner

The absurdist stuff wasn't terribly popular at the time I was doing it. ~ Robert Sheckley