Top 100 Samuel Beckett Quotes
#1. Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.
Samuel Beckett
#2. At last I began to think, that is to say to listen harder.
Samuel Beckett
#4. Vladimir: I don't understand.
Estragon: Use your intelligence, can't you?
Vladimir uses his intelligence.
Vladimir: (finally) I remain in the dark.
Samuel Beckett
#5. Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.
Samuel Beckett
#6. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#9. But it is useless to dwell on this period of my life. If I go on long enough calling that my life I'll end up by believing it.
Samuel Beckett
#11. I have spoken softly, gone my ways softly, all my days, as behoves one who has nothing to say, nowhere to go, and so nothing to gain by being seen or heard.
Samuel Beckett
#12. ... where gradually as you peered trying to make it out gradually of all things a face appeared ...
Samuel Beckett
#14. Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.
Samuel Beckett
#15. Misfortunes, blessings, I have no time to pick my words, I am in a hurry to be done. And yet no, I am in no hurry.
Samuel Beckett
#16. For he who has once had to listen will listen always, whether he knows he will never hear anything again, or whether he does not. In other words, they like other words, no doubt about it, silence once broken will never again be whole.
Samuel Beckett
#17. And what I have, what I am, is enough, was always enough for me, and as far as my dear little sweet little future is concerned I have no qualms, I have a good time coming.
Samuel Beckett
#18. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.
Samuel Beckett
#19. Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing.
Samuel Beckett
#20. Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can't tell them to you?
Samuel Beckett
#21. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity.
Samuel Beckett
#22. I feel the old dark gathering, the solitude preparing, by which I know myself, and the call of that ignorance which might be noble and is mere poltroonery.
Samuel Beckett
#23. I saw the mountain, impassible, cavernous, secret, where from morning to night I'd hear nothing but the wind, the curlews, the clink like distant silver of the stone-cutters' hammers.
Samuel Beckett
#24. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#25. Estragon: And if he doesn't come?
Vladimir: (after a moment of bewilderment) We'll see when the time comes.
Samuel Beckett
#29. Charming hour of the day, particularly when, as sometimes happens, it is also that of the setting sun whose last rays, raking the street from end to end, lend to my cenotaph an interminable shadow, astraddle of the gutter and the sidewalk.
Samuel Beckett
#30. Humbly to ask a favour of people who are on the point of knocking your brains out sometimes produces good results.
Samuel Beckett
#31. Watt'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 Beckett
#32. It was a strange room, the door hanging off its hinges, and yet a telephone. But its last occupant was a harlot, long past her best, which had been scarlet.
Samuel Beckett
#33. I've got my faults, but changing my tune isn't one of them.
Samuel Beckett
#34. Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain amount of both. They being one.
Samuel Beckett
#35. Hell itself, although eternal, dates from the revolt of Lucifer. It is therefore permissible, in the light of this distant analogy, to think of myself as being here for ever, but not as having been here for ever.
Samuel Beckett
#36. He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.
Samuel Beckett
#37. This tired abstract anger; inarticulate passive opposition; always the same thing in dublin
Samuel Beckett
#39. The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.
Samuel Beckett
#40. But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.
Samuel Beckett
#41. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#42. All the time buzzing ... so-called ... in the ears ... though of course actually ... not in the ears at all ... in the skull ... dull roar in the skull ...
Samuel Beckett
#43. [A]ll I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante.
Samuel Beckett
#44. Nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z. Or say for verisimilitude the Balloygan Road. That dear old back road. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road in lieu of nowhere in particular. Where no truck anymore. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road on the way from A to Z.
Samuel Beckett
#45. Ada: And why life? (Pause.) Why life, Henry? (Pause.) Is there anyone about?
Henry: Not a living soul.
Ada: I thought as much. (Pause.) When we longed to have it to ourselves there was always someone. Now that it does not matter the place is deserted.
Samuel Beckett
#46. And yet I am afraid, afraid of what my words will do to me, to my refuge, yet again ... If I could speak and yet say nothing, really nothing? Then I might escape being gnawed to death.
Samuel Beckett
#49. In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.
Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?
Samuel Beckett
#50. Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.
Samuel Beckett
#51. 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. *1937
Samuel Beckett
#52. He had a curious hunted walk, like that of a destitute diabetic in a strange city.
Samuel Beckett
#54. With all this darkness round me I feel less alone.
Samuel Beckett
#55. Does it really matter which hand is employed to absterge the podex?
Samuel Beckett
#56. Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.
Samuel Beckett
#57. From the meanest creature one departs wiser, richer, more conscious of one's blessings.
Samuel Beckett
#59. I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.
Samuel Beckett
#60. Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.
Samuel Beckett
#62. God knows I'm not intelligent otherwise I'd be dead
Samuel Beckett
#63. So it is with time, that lightens what is dark, that darkens what is light.
Samuel Beckett
#64. The turmoil of the day freezes in a thousand absurd postures.
Samuel Beckett
#65. The sky sinks in the morning, this fact has been insufficiently observed.
Samuel Beckett
#66. So all things limp together for the only possible.
Samuel Beckett
#67. Art has always been this
pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric
whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.
Samuel Beckett
#68. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the end of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven asporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits.
Samuel Beckett
#69. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#70. Evoke at painful junctures, when discouragement threatens to raise its head, the image of a vast cretinous mouth, red blubber and slobbering, in solitary confinement, extruding indefatigably, with a noise of wet kisses and washing in a tub, the words that obstruct it.
Samuel Beckett
#71. If you do not love me I shall not be loved If I do not love you I shall not love.
Samuel Beckett
#72. But to tell the truth (to tell the truth!) I have never been particularly resolute, I mean given to resolutions, but rather inclined to plunge headlong into the shit, without knowing who was shitting against whom or on which side I had the better chance of skulking with success.
Samuel Beckett
#73. For the climber averse to avoidable acrobatics a given niche may lie so many paces or meters to east or west of the woman vanquished without of course his naming her thus or otherwise even in his thoughts.
Samuel Beckett
#74. Don't look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.
Samuel Beckett
#75. VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go.
They do not move.
Samuel Beckett
#76. Delicious instants, before one's eyes get used to the dark.
Samuel Beckett
#77. Is there then no hope? Good gracious, no, heavens, what an idea! Just a faint one perhaps, but which will never serve. But one forgets.
Samuel Beckett
#78. I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.
Samuel Beckett
#79. That childhood said to have been mine the difficulty of believing in it the feeling rather of having been born octogenarian at the age when one dies in the dark
Samuel Beckett
#80. Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it's me?
Samuel Beckett
#82. Estragon: we lost our rights?
vladimir: we got rid of them.
Samuel Beckett
#84. Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
Samuel Beckett
#85. There is man in his entirety, blaming his shoe when his foot is guilty.
Samuel Beckett
#87. As for my needs, they had dwindled as it were to my dimensions and become, if I may say so, of so exquisite a quality as to exclude all thought of succour.
Samuel Beckett
#90. Terrible mania, when something happens, to enquire what.
Samuel Beckett
#91. Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?
Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.
Samuel Beckett
#92. Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.
Samuel Beckett
#93. What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.
Samuel Beckett
#94. You think you are simply resting, the better to act when the time comes, or for no reason, and you soon find yourself powerless ever to do anything again.
Samuel Beckett
#95. Let us say before i go any further, that i forgive nobody. i wish them all an atrocious life in the fires of icy hell and in the execrable generations to come.
Samuel Beckett
#96. Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again.
Samuel Beckett
#97. Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, words have been my only loves, not many.
Samuel Beckett
#98. The day that you die will be like any other day ... only shorter.
Samuel Beckett
#100. White world, great trouble, not a sound, only the embers, sound of dying, dying glow
Samuel Beckett
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