SURREALISM QUOTES

quotations about surrealism

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That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.

AMY REED

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Surrealism ... wills itself to be a philosophy, but a "philosophy of life," a way of living and thinking, a madness of living and thinking which, refusing the world as it is--since the "real" is often only habit--proposes both to "transform the world" (Marx) and to "change life" (Rimbaud), in a political and poetical rebellion.

JAQUELINE CHÉNIEUX-GENDRON

Tags: Jaqueline Chénieux-Gendron

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It seems to me that it is a very simple error which the surrealists are guilty of; they are trying to establish an Absolute. They are trying with all the powers of consciousness to usher in the glory of the Unconscious. They believe in the Devil but not in God. They worship the night but refuse to worship the day. They talk of magic but they practice voodooism. They await the miracle, but they do nothing to assist it, to bring about an accouchement. They talk of ushering in a general confusion but they live like the bourgeoisie. A few of them have committed suicide, but none of them has yet assassinated a tyrant. The believe in the revolution but there is no real revolt in them.

HENRY MILLER

Tags: Henry Miller

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Surrealism is ersatz thought for idiots; the gaudy vestibule of a house that isn't there.

HUGO RIFKIND

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Surrealism is a tangled web of contradictions. This is, paradoxically, both its raison d'être and the limitation that it strives perpetually to overcome. It is also, I would argue, the condition that has granted it a long afterlife beyond the borders of World War II-era France.

MELANIE NICHOLSON

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Surrealism almost always uses contrasting color tones to bring out the literary contrast between the clashing ideas of reality and hallucination. The narrative is interspersed with dream-like sequences that revel in Surrealism in all its glory.

SCREENGOBBLR

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Art that revels in the muck of the unconscious, as surrealism tries to do, should risk at least a few of us saying, "F*** this."

K. AUSTIN COLLINS

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I've always been fascinated by how surrealism can give extraordinary meaning to ordinary things.

JESSE AMADO

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The more I look at most of the art movements, it's all occultism, when you get down to it. The Surrealists were openly talking about being magicians.

ALAN MOORE

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Surrealism, which fizzled as an autonomous doctrine, as a specific method, does not exist. But it remains an historical fact, a fire that illuminates the intellectual landscape of the horizon.

PAUL NOUGE

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I find out a lot about myself by sleeping. Dreams, they are who I am when I'm too tired to be me.

JAROD KINTZ

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Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.

SALVADOR DALI

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Surrealism, then, neither aims to subvert realism, as does the fantastic, nor does it try to transcend it. It looks for different means by which to explore reality itself.

MICHAEL RICHARDSON

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There is no sharp line drawn between the paintings and sculptures and the wider worlds of design that Surrealism touched: the crazy furniture, the exhibition catalogues and posters, the sketchbooks and letters. Surrealism was never confined to the exhibition hall.

CHARLOTTE RUNCIE

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Language, which has always been a medium relatively unsuited to the description of complex visual shapes and patterns, is at a particular disadvantage when it comes to conveying the shockingly unusual images of Surrealism.

CARL FREEDMAN

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Surrealist Tip # 7: Sleep through numbers 1-6. Write down your dreams while you sleep, sleep as fast as you can, but try not to get a ticket--and don't let the honking of other drivers wake you up.

JAROD KINTZ

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Surrealism negates everything implied by the divisions and prohibitions on which the majority cultural structure is founded: negating ready-made "orders," denying the pertinence of codes (social, but also stylistic, linguistic, and even logical). Surrealists therefore suspect everything that organizes the sense of things, the direction of things, in space and time, especially any kind of taxonomy and any presentation of evidence that has signification for us.

JAQUELINE CHÉNIEUX-GENDRON

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The surrealists are mystics who ignore deities in their quest of surreality. Quest of what? Stated Breton in his manifesto: "I don't know, but quest however."

JEAN-CLAUDE MICHEL

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The great task of this century is that of revising the old scales of value in every field, of destroying worn-out customs and institutions and of constructing a form of society in which men may be able to make full use of all their faculties. Few poets ... have set about this task with so great a thoroughness as the surrealists. Already they have succeeded in widening and deepening the total of human experience.

DAVID GASCOYNE

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Surrealist art is very far removed from the abstract or from so-called pure art, which on the contrary dematerializes the object into an idea. It also becomes quite evident that the artist has wandered far from symbolism and impressionism. The generalized role that the symbol bestows on the concrete is the exact reverse of the character of the surrealist art object which is a study in the particular delivering the object from its general role to bestow on it a specialized new one.

ANNA BALAKIAN

Tags: Anna Balakian

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