Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' You won't believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.
Samuel BeckettReality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.
Samuel BeckettI shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
Samuel BeckettYou 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.
Samuel BeckettWatt's concern, deep as it appeared, was not after all what the figure was, in reality, but with what the figure appeared to be, in reality.
Samuel BeckettI 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.
Samuel BeckettI 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.
Samuel BeckettYes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.
Samuel BeckettYou 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.
Samuel BeckettNothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that… Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.
Samuel BeckettThey give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
Samuel BeckettWe spend our life, it's ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench
Samuel BeckettNormally 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.
Samuel BeckettAll I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.
Samuel BeckettI 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.
Samuel BeckettEstragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: Yes, yes, we're magicians.
Samuel BeckettBut at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!
Samuel BeckettFor the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.
Samuel BeckettUntil 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.
Samuel Beckett