Top 321 Quotes & Sayings by Samuel Beckett - Page 5

Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.

We are all born; some remain so.

Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!

An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.

The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, and more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar, and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon, and stars of the mind, the whole mind.

Was I asleep? Had I slept?

Light black. From pole to pole.

What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can. But mostly I shall use the various tenses of the past. For mostly I do not know, it is perhaps no longer so, it is too soon to know, I simply do not know, perhaps shall never know.

Where you have nothing, there you should want nothing.

Dying for dark — and the darker the Worse. Strange.

What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come

I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.

The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness around me I feel less alone. (Pause.) In a way. (Pause.) I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to... (hesitates) ...me. (Pause.)

How hideous is the semicolon.

I cannot explain my plays. Each must find out for himself what is meant

I don’t like animals. It’s a strange thing, I don’t like men and I don’t like animals. As for God, he is beginning to disgust me.

My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.

Try again. Fail again. Try better.

What was God doing with himself before the creation?

Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it for the time needed for it to love it and you it, then throw it away.

I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was supposed to consist. And my father's face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?

You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness.

But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something.

Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle.

What is more true than anything else? To swim is true and to sink is true. One cannot speak any more of being, one must speak onlyof the mess.

I still smile it's not worth the trouble any more for a long time now it's not been worth the trouble the tongue spring goes into the mud I stay like this not thirsty any more the tongue goes back into the mouth it closes it has to make a straight line now it's done I've made the image.

Words fail, there are times when even they fail.

There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind.

I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous, and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. 'Nothing is more real than nothing.' They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.

What can it matter to me, that I succeed or fail ? The undertaking is none of mine, if they want me to succeed I'll fail, and vice versa, so as not to be rid of my tormentors.

Hardly had the glow been kindled by some good deed on your part or by some little triumph over your rivals or by a word of praisefrom your parents or mentors when it would begin to cool and fade leaving you in a very short time as chill and dim as before.

As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places.

POZZO: I am blind. (Silence.) ESTRAGON: Perhaps he can see into the future.

That penny farthing hell you call your mind

You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.

I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of — how shall I say, I don’t know.

My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record.

I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.

...and a dream away in space with neither her nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away. Nor for in the end again by degrees or as though switched on dark falls there again that certain dark that alone certain ashes can. Through it who knows yet another end beneath a cloudless sky of a last end if ever there had to be another absolutely had to be.

My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don't understand how it can be endured.

HAMM: We're not beginning to... to... mean something? CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!

All that is active, all that is enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might be described as an abstract, ideal and absolute impermeability.

I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark forever.

Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.

When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.

Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most

Yes, light, there is no other word for it.

I speak for an art ... weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.

How time flies when one has fun!

Estragon: Suppose we repented. Vladimir: Repented what? Estragon: Oh...(He reflects.) We wouldn’t have to go into the details. Vladimir: Our being born?

[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.

Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning.

All the things you would do gladly, oh without enthusiasm, but gladly, all the things there seems no reason for your not doing, and that you do not do! Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.

The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter. And at the same time I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never.

Estragon: Nothing to be done.

That passed the time. It would have passed in any case. Yes, but not so rapidly.

Do they [the publishers of Murphy] not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and thatto compress it further can only make it more obscure?

I asked her to look at me and after a few moments - (pause) - after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low) Let me in.

The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).

Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.