Top 321 Quotes & Sayings by Samuel Beckett - Page 4

What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.

Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.

Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.

Women are all the bloody sameyou can't love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery.

Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others. So you get up and go to your mother, who thinks she is alive. That's my impression. But now I shall have to get myself out of this ditch. How joyfully I would vanish here, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains.

I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.

We could have saved sixpence. We could have saved fivepence. But at what cost?

And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.

They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance.

Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passionate and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars.

James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.

Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain amount of both. They being one.

To what will love not stoop!

It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much. A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. I can't be punished any more. I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I'll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.

Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.

it's impossible I should have a mind and I have one

It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.

There's no lack of void.

You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other.

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.

I say me, knowing all the while it's not me.

in reality we are one and all from the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh without breach or fissure

The only thing you must never speak of is your happiness.

The reality of the individualis an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.

Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: Yes, yes, we're magicians.

My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art.

Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.

I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.

Love requited is a short circuit.

We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.

My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that? Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.

Sloth is all passions the most powerful.

She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.

The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.

Estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.

Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.

To find a form that accommodates the shape of the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.

Estragon: I can't go on like this. Vladimir: That's what you think.

What kind of country is this where a woman can't weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!

My keepers, why keepers, I'm in no danger of stirring an inch, ah I see, it's to make me think I'm a prisoner, frantic with corporeality, rearing to get out and away.

Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. Gently gently. On. Careful.

Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.

There is this to be said for Dachsunds of such length and lowness as Nelly, that it makes very little difference to their appearance whether they stand, sit or lie.

Imagination at wit's end spreads its sad wings.

I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.

Where am I, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

Enough to know no knowing.

That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.

Yes, I dont know why, but I have never been disappointed, and I often was in the early days, without feeling at the same time, or a moment later, an undeniable relief.

We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let's get to work! (He advances towards the heap, stops in his stride.) In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone more, in the midst of nothingness!

Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.

How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast.

The short winter’s day was drawing to a close. It seems to me sometimes that these are the only days I have ever known, and especially that most charming moment of all, just before night wipes them out.