Samuel Beckett Quotes

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

There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.

In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.

The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.

Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.

What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?

Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits.

Estragon: What about hanging ourselves? Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.

The day you die is just like any other, only shorter.

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

It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.

If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.

We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

People are bloody ignorant apes.

All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.

How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.

But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.

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

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.

It was the only way to progress, to stop.

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?

Habit is a great deadener.

To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?

Fail, fail again, fail better.

Enough to know no knowing.

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.

Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.

It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.

...you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on

The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the edge of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits. I've swallowed three hooks and am still hungry. Hence the howls. What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but strech out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for eternity.

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

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.

But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.

Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.

There is man in his entirety, blaming his shoe when his foot is guilty.

That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.

But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying. I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.

The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.

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

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

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.

It's a rare thing not to have been bonny-- once.

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

Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.