"For life itself is no solution, life has no kind of existence which is chosen, consented to, and self-determined. It is a mere series of hungers and adverse forces, of petty contradictions which succeed or miscarry according to the circumstances of an odious gamble."

"I can neither live nor die, nor am I capable of not wishing to die or live. And all mankind resembles me."

"After all, we are only trees and is probably written in some crook or other of my family tree that I shall kill myself on a given day."

"I am the man who has most felt the stupefying confusion of his speech in its relations with thought. I am the man who has most accurately charted the moment of his most intimate, his most imperceptible lapses. I lose myself in my thought, actually, the way one dreams, the way one suddenly slips back into one’s thought. I am the man who knows the inmost recesses of loss."

"There is no use telling me that this death trap is inside me. I am part of life, I represent the fatality that chooses me, and it is not possible that all the life in the world counts me with it at a given moment, since by its very nature it threatens the principle of life."

"When shall we meet again? When will the earthy taste of your lips come again to brush the anxiety of my mind? Will all our sensations remain forever intellectual, and will not our dreams succeed in igniting one soul whose feeling will help us to die? What is this death in which we are forever alone, in which love does not show us the way?"

"Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh."

"Life will go on, events will unfold, spiritual conflicts will be resolved, and I shall not participate in any of it. I have nothing to expect either from the physical or the psychological point of view. For me there is perpetual pain and darkness, the night of the soul, and I have no voice to cry out."

"I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me."

"I suffer from a frightful disease of the mind. My thought abandons me at all stages. From the simple act of thinking to the external act of its materialization in words. Words, forms of phrases, inner directions of thinking, simple reactions of the mind—I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Hence, whenever I can seize upon a form, however imperfect it may be, I hold it fast, lest I lost the entire thought. I am beneath myself, I know it, it makes me suffer, but I accept the fact in the fear of not dying entirely."

"I would have liked to find something intelligent to say to you, in order to make clear what separates us, but no use. I am a mind still unshaped, like an imbecile. Think whatever you like of me."

"I feel no hunger for death; I simply hunger not to be, never to have dropped into this sink of imbecilities, abdications, renunciations, and obtuse contacts which make up the conscious self of Antonin Artaud and are even weaker than he is. The conscious self of this wandering invalid, who from time to time keeps trying to exhibit his shadow, which he himself spat on long ago; this self on crutches, limping along; this virtual, impossible self which nevertheless is part of reality. None like him ever felt his weakness, yet his weakness is the most important weakness of all mankind. To be destroyed, not to exist."