Top 100 Quotes About Beckett
#1. Nor did he think of Celia any more, though he could sometimes remember having dreamt of her. If only he had been able to think of her, he would not have needed to dream of her.
Samuel Beckett
#3. The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.
Bernard Beckett
#4. I say, you look smashing this evening," Zayne strode over to her, took her arm, and began helping her up the walk, "That is a lovely gown, and what is the color of the hair you're currently sporting?
Jen Turano
#5. I was out of sorts. They are deep, my sorts, a deep ditch, and I am not often out of them.
Samuel Beckett
#7. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#8. Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.
Samuel Beckett
#9. Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher's regular, what normal woman wants affection?
Samuel Beckett
#10. Today's dialogue has succeeded in reinforcing the need for international partnerships and cooperation in tackling the reality of climate change.
Margaret Beckett
#11. I smell you off him, she screamed, he stinks of bitch.
Samuel Beckett
#13. At last I began to think, that is to say to listen harder.
Samuel Beckett
#14. How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?
Samuel Beckett
#15. Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.
Samuel Beckett
#17. POZZO: I am blind. (Silence.) ESTRAGON: Perhaps he can see into the future.
Samuel Beckett
#18. Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett's canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett's Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Harold Bloom
#19. Can it be out of discretion, and a reluctance to hurt, that they affect to be unaware of my existence? But this is a refinement of feeling which can hardly be attributed to the dogs that come pissing against my abode, apparently never doubting that it contains some flesh and bones.
Samuel Beckett
#20. The loss of my sight was a great fillip. If I could go deaf and dumb I think I might pant on to be a hundred.
Samuel Beckett
#21. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#22. I wish the choice I have to make today was so simple. I realise I have the choice to believe in two terrible things. Either Damian is a murderer or Beckett arrested an innocent man.
Just thinking about it is making my head hurt.
Well then forget your head, listen to your heart.
Richard Castle
#23. 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
#24. I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.
Samuel Beckett
#25. Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.
Samuel Beckett
#27. Watch out for men who want to turn everything into a story that's all about them. There will always be a few of them, and once one of them starts, another one of them will want to fight with him.
Chris Beckett
#28. But all this was nothing compared to the face which I regret to say vaguely resembled my own, less the refinement of course, same little abortive moustache, same little ferrety eyes, same paraphimosis of the nose, and a thin red mouth that looked as if it was raw from trying to shit its tongue.
Samuel Beckett
#30. 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
#31. The rewards that will flow from a successful shift to a low carbon economy are high. Neither governments nor business can afford to let these opportunities pass them by
Margaret Beckett
#32. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#33. The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.
Samuel Beckett
#34. I have always been amazed at my contemporaries' lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.
Samuel Beckett
#35. I'm not avoiding specifics, but I've always written songs from more of a global standpoint.
William Beckett
#36. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#39. I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.
Michel Foucault
#40. This version of the facts having been restored, it only remains to say it is no better than the other and no less incompatible with the kind of creature I might just conceivably have been if they had known how to take me. So let us consider now what really occurred.
Samuel Beckett
#41. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#43. 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
#44. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#46. It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger.
Samuel Beckett
#47. you don't feel a mouth on you, you don't feel your mouth any more, no need of a mouth, the words are everywhere, inside me, outside me...
Samuel Beckett
#48. Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.
Samuel Beckett
#49. My way is in the sand flowing
between the shingle and the dune
the summer rain rains on my life
on me my life harrying fleeing
to its beginning to its end
Samuel Beckett
#50. 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
#51. This is it, Beck. This is the hardest part of loving someone: not being with them when you want to be. It's so bad you can taste it.
Debra Anastasia
#52. What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I'm not sure of it.
Samuel Beckett
#53. taking his lead from Beckett's mighty Unnamable. I can't go on. I'll go on.
Salman Rushdie
#54. To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.
Samuel Beckett
#55. ... where gradually as you peered trying to make it out gradually of all things a face appeared ...
Samuel Beckett
#57. I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.
Samuel Beckett
#59. 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
#60. I think that a great song needs the full package. I think that a great song needs everything from lyrics, to melody, to music, and it needs to be interesting and it needs take you in and swallow you and swish you around, and then regurgitate you back in better form.
William Beckett
#61. Having oscillated all his life between the torments of a superficial loitering and the horrors of disinterested endeavour, he finds himself at last in a situation where to do nothing exclusively would be an act of the highest value, and significance.
Samuel Beckett
#62. Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.
Samuel Beckett
#63. Opens up a whole new view of Beckett. The strong mutual attraction between Beckett and Cunard may help explain the leftist political views he expressed both in these superb and long-neglected translations for Negro and elsewhere in his work.
Barney Rosset
#64. I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.
Samuel Beckett
#65. 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
#66. Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don't know, I shouldn't have begun.
Samuel Beckett
#67. We spend our life, it's ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench
Samuel Beckett
#68. 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
#69. VLADIMIR: What do they say? ESTRAGON: They talk about their lives. VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them. ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it.
Samuel Beckett
#70. 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
#71. Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. It's very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover God's great plan.
Bernard Beckett
#72. I want to play a show at Madison Square Garden in New York, which is where the New York Knicks play. That's what I want.
William Beckett
#73. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#74. Thatcher set ordinary people free, but into a landscape that her other policies had already shaped to suit other, more powerful interests, such as large corporations or Britons with inherited wealth.
Andy Beckett
#75. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.
Samuel Beckett
#76. Beckett planned to go out with a shit-eating grin because, well, fuck you, world.
Debra Anastasia
#77. Know this: I love you so fucking much," Beckett said. "No other person has been to me what you are. No one else ever will be." He leaned down and gave her the sweetest, gentlest kiss.
Debra Anastasia
#78. To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?
Samuel Beckett
#79. The life of an artist is a continuous journey, the path long and never ending.
Justin Beckett
#80. He imagines that when I see him indefatigable I'll regret my decision. Such is his miserable scheme. As though I were short of slaves!
Samuel Beckett
#81. From things about to disappear I turn away in time. To watch them out of sight, no, I can't do it.
Samuel Beckett
#82. I'd say Ernest Hemingway would be a blast to get drunk with.
William Beckett
#83. There is no life without work, anxieties or tensions. Peace is not found in avoiding these but in understanding them and controlling their force.
Wendy Beckett
#84. The sort where moon don't rhyme with June, and you're not up to your backside in bloody buttercups. Songs that aren't about your mum and dad. A bit rough, a beat that busts up the old way, the old stodge, the empire and knowing your place and excuse me and the dressing up and doing what you're told.
Francis Beckett
#85. You have infiltrated me completely, you make me feel alive Harlow, and I love that feeling. I have had my heart walled off for so long, and you have melted it so I can feel again. ~Beckett
S.M. Stryker
#86. Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing.
Samuel Beckett
#87. Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can't tell them to you?
Samuel Beckett
#88. Samuel Beckett wrote, "Fail, fail again. Fail better.
Keith Ferrazzi
#89. The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.
Samuel Beckett
#90. Silence.
Then the night echoed with Beckett's anguished wail. NOT MY BROTHERS!
Debra Anastasia
#91. Which is the more useful, the scientific world-view, with all its wonderful technical miracles, or the religious world-view, with its sense of purpose and belonging?
Chris Beckett
#92. 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.
Samuel Beckett
#93. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity.
Samuel Beckett
#94. James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.
Samuel Beckett
#96. Was it worth giving up anything in order to survive, no matter how precious it was? What if you gave up so much of yourself that there was nothing left of who you truly were.
Galen Beckett
#97. HAMM
Open the window.
CLOV
What for?
HAMM
I want to hear the sea.
CLOV
You wouldn't hear it.
HAMM Even if you opened the window?
CLOV
No.
HAMM
Then it's not worth opening it?
CLOV
No.
HAMM(violently)
Then open it!
Samuel Beckett
#98. The dream world, the true freedom of the imagination, does not open to self-conscious manipulation.
Wendy Beckett
#99. Fairy tales, before they were sanitized, were very dark, and kids love that. 'Coraline' by Neil Gaiman feels like Beckett for kids. I think there's plenty of room for that. And I think there's a danger of being too patronizing to children, having things too sanitized.
Edward Carey
#100. There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.
Samuel Beckett
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