Samuel Beckett Quotes

And if I have always behaved like a pig, the fault lies not with me but with my superiors, who corrected me only on points of detail instead of showing me the essence of the system ... ~ Samuel Beckett

What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all
eternity. A pity I should have to give tongue at the same time, it prevents it from bleeding in peace, licking the lips. ~ Samuel Beckett

I shall be neutral and inert. No difficulty there. Throes are the only trouble, I must be on my guard against throes. But I am less given to them now, since coming here. ~ Samuel Beckett

The only sin is the sin of being born ~ Samuel Beckett

Probably nothing in the world arouses more false hopes than the first four hours of a diet. ~ Samuel Beckett

The punchline of the story relates to an American academic saying of Beckett, 'He doesn't give a fuck about people. He's an artist.' At this point Beckett raised his voice above the clatter of afternoon tea and shouted, 'But I do give a fuck about people! I do give a fuck! ~ James Knowlson

And is it not strange most strange that one says of a thing that it is full, when it is not full at all, but not of a thing that is empty, if it is not empty? And perhaps the reason for that is this, that when one fills, one seldom fills quite full, for that would not be convenient, whereas when one empties one empties completely, holding the vessel upside down, and rinsing it out with boiling water if necessary, with a kind of fury. ~ Samuel Beckett

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. ~ Samuel Beckett

It was December, I had never felt so cold, the eel soup lay heavy on my stomach, I was afraid I'd die, I turned aside to vomit, I envied them. ~ Samuel Beckett

It's notorious, ah you can't deny it, some people are lucky, born of a wet dream and dead before morning ~ Samuel Beckett

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. ~ Samuel Beckett

It's a lot to ask of one creature, it's a lot to ask, that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions. ~ Samuel Beckett

To what will love not stoop! ~ Samuel Beckett

My time is limited. It is thence that one fine day, when all nature smiles and shines, the rack lets loose its black unforgettable cohorts and sweeps away the blue for ever. My situation is truly delicate. What fine things, what momentous things, i am going to miss through fear, fear of falling back into the old error, fear of not finishing in time, fear of revelling, for the last time, in a last outpouring of misery, impotence and hate. The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness. ~ Samuel Beckett

(Looking at the tree) Pity we haven't got a bit of rope. ~ Samuel Beckett

God is love. Yes or no? No. ~ Samuel Beckett

I shall not speak of my sufferings. Cowering deep down among them I feel nothing. It is there I die, unbeknown to my stupid flesh. That which is seen, that which cries and writhes, my witless remains. Somewhere in the turmoil thought struggles on, it too wide of the mark. It too seeks me, as it always has, where I am not to be found. ~ Samuel Beckett

Are you capable of following me? He did not answer. But I seized his thoughts as clearly as if he had spoken them, namely, And you, are you capable of leading me? ~ Samuel Beckett

It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much. A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns. ~ Samuel Beckett

You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To ~ Samuel Beckett

ESTRAGON: In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.
VLADIMIR: You're right, we're inexhaustible.
ESTRAGON: It's so we won't think.
VLADIMIR: We have that excuse.
ESTRAGON: It's so we won't hear.
VLADIMIR: We have our reasons.
ESTRAGON: All the dead voices. ~ Samuel Beckett

I them, the master, myself, we are all innocent, enough. Innocent of what, no one knows, of wanting to know, wanting to be able, of all this noise about nothing, of this long sin against the silence that enfolds us, we wont ask any more, what it covers, this innocence we have fallen to, it covers everything, all faults, all questions, it puts an end to questions. ~ Samuel Beckett

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned. ~ Samuel Beckett

Incontinent the void. The zenith. Evening again. When not night it will be evening. Death again of deathless day. On one hand embers. On the other ashes. Day without end won and lost. Unseen. ~ Samuel Beckett

All hangs together, I am in chains. ~ Samuel Beckett

I am interested in the shape of ideas, even if I do not believe in them ~ Samuel Beckett

Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing. ~ Samuel Beckett

And I was wondering how to depart without self-loathing or sadness, or with as little as possible, when a kind of immense sigh all around me announced it was not I who was departing, but the flock. ~ Samuel Beckett

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. ~ Samuel Beckett

How long have I been here, what a question, I've often wondered. And often I could answer, An hour, a month, a year, a century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being, and there I never went looking for extravagant meanings, there I never much varied, only the here would sometimes seem to vary. ~ Samuel Beckett

Once a certain degree of insight has been reached," said Wylie, "all men talk, when talk they must, the same tripe. ~ Samuel Beckett

She began stroking my ankles. I considered kicking her in the cunt. ~ Samuel Beckett

Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. ~ Samuel Beckett

Perhaps I shall be obliged, in order not to peter out, to invent another fairy-tale, yet another, with heads, trunks, arms, legs and all that follows, let loose in the changeless round of imperfect shadow and dubious light. ~ Samuel Beckett

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

The blue face! The obscene protrusion of the tongue! The tumefaction of the penis! The penis, well now, that's a surprise, I'd forgotten I had one. What a pity I have no arms, there might still be something to be wrung from it. No, 'tis better thus. At my age, to start manstuprating again, it would be indecent. And fruitless. And yet one can never tell. With a yo heave yo, concentrating with all my might on a horse's rump, at the moment when the tail raises, who knows, I might not go altogether empty-handed away. Heaven, I almost felt it flutter! ~ Samuel Beckett

VLADIMIR: Moron!
ESTRAGON: Vermin!
VLADIMIR: Abortion!
ESTRAGON: Morpion!
VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!
ESTRAGON: Curate!
VLADIMIR: Cretin!
ESTRAGON: (with finality). Crritic!
VLADIMIR: Oh!
He wilts, vanquished, and turns away. ~ Samuel Beckett

But he found it strange to think of these little changes of scene, the little gains, the little losses, the thing brought, the thing removed, the light given, the light taken, and all the vain offerings to the hour, ~ Samuel Beckett

VLADIMIR: (after a moment of bewilderment). We'll see when the time comes. (Pause.) I was saying that things have changed here since yesterday.
ESTRAGON: Everything oozes.
VLADIMIR: Look at the tree.
ESTRAGON: It's never the same pus from one second to the next.
VLADIMIR: The tree, look at the tree. Estragon looks at the tree.
ESTRAGON: Was it not there yesterday?
VLADIMIR: Yes of course it was there. Do you not remember? We nearly hanged ourselves from it. But you wouldn't. Do you not remember?
ESTRAGON: You dreamt it.
VLADIMIR: Is it possible you've forgotten already?
ESTRAGON: That's the way I am. Either I forget immediately or I never forget. ~ Samuel Beckett

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile ... a stain upon the silence. ~ Samuel Beckett

Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what. ~ Samuel Beckett

After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines - well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads - that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco - the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me. ~ Denis Johnson

Think of that! He removes his hat without misgiving, he unbuttons his coat and sits down, proffered all pure and open to the long joys of being himself, like a basin to a vomit. ~ Samuel Beckett

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.
Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps.
We have time to grow old.
The air is full of our cries.
But habit is a great deadener.
At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing.
Let him sleep on. ~ Samuel Beckett

All roads were right for me, a wrong road was an event, for me. ~ Samuel Beckett

And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. ~ Samuel Beckett

The turmoil of the day freezes in a thousand absurd postures. ~ Samuel Beckett

Vladimir: What do we do now?
Estragon: Wait.
Vladimir: Yes, but while waiting.
Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?
Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.
Estragon: (highly excited). An erection!
Vladimir: With all that follows.
Where it falls mandrakes grow.
That's why they shriek when you pull them up.
Did you not know that?
Estragon: Let's hang ourselves immediately! ~ Samuel Beckett

So he is. So that faint uneasiness lost. That faint hope. To one with so few occasions to feel. So inapt to feel. Asking nothing better in so far as he can ask anything than to feel nothing. Is it desirable? No. Would he gain thereby in companionability? No. Then let him not be named H. Let him be again as he was. The hearer. Unnamable. You. ~ Samuel Beckett

Yes, 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 Beckett

The inspection once completed it is usual to put everything carefully back in place as far as possible. It is enjoined by a certain ethics not to do unto others what coming from them might give offence. ~ Samuel Beckett

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation. ~ Samuel Beckett

Words fail, there are times when even they fail. ~ Samuel Beckett

A mug's game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so. ~ Samuel Beckett

Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot. ~ Samuel Beckett

For why be discouraged, one of the thieves was saved, that is a generous percentage. ~ Samuel Beckett

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

So that I would have hesitated to exclaim, with my finger up my arse-hole for example, Jesus Christ, it's much worse than yesterday, I can hardly believe it is the same hole. ~ Samuel Beckett

Oh it is not without scathe that one is gentle, courteous, reasonable, patient, day after day, year after year. ~ Samuel Beckett

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

...saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love
...
terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you ~ Samuel Beckett

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

If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing. ~ Samuel Beckett

I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly. ~ Samuel Beckett

I don't think there's been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He's unique. He was a most charming man and I used to send him my plays. ~ Harold Pinter

Birth was the death of me ~ Samuel Beckett

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. ~ Samuel Beckett

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

It is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and style. To me they have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. ~ Samuel Beckett

Better hope deferred than none. ~ Samuel Beckett

Vladimir: Did I ever leave you? Estragon: You let me go. ~ Samuel Beckett

Why then the human voice, rather than a hyena's howls or the clanging of a hammer? Answer, so that the shock may not be too great, when the writhings of true lips meet his gaze. Between them they find a rejoinder to everything. And how they enjoy talking, they know there is no worse torment, for one not in the conversation. ~ Samuel Beckett

We could have saved sixpence. We could have saved fivepence. But at what cost? ~ Samuel Beckett

Guy cradled his tux, stroking it, running his fingers incestuously over the satin stripe on the trousers. There is a satisfaction that only superb clothing can offer, the joy of man raising himself from the mud, vindicating evolution. Life cannot lack purpose if a tuxedo exists - this is the obvious reply to the Samuel Beckett canon. ~ Paul Rudnick

The function of treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of discrete particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable balanced manner, and comfort himself with the society of others in the same predicament. ~ Samuel Beckett

So there is nothing to be afraid of. And yet I am afraid, afraid of what my words will do to me, to my refuge, yet again. Is there really nothing new to try? I mentioned my hope, but it is not serious. If I could speak and yet say nothing, really nothing? ~ Samuel Beckett

Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don't there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little. ~ Samuel Beckett

HAMM:
Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?
NAGG:
I didn't know.
HAMM:
What? What didn't you know?
NAGG:
That it'd be you.
(Pause.) ~ Samuel Beckett

All I hear leave out more leave out all hear no more lie there in my arms the ancient without end me we're talking of me without end that buries all mankind to the last cunt they'd be good moments in the dark the mud hearing nothing saying nothing capable of nothing nothing ~ Samuel Beckett

Will night never come? ~ Samuel Beckett

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

Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don't know, I shouldn't have begun. ~ Samuel Beckett

Though now even less than ever given to wonder he cannot but sometimes wonder if it is indeed to and of him the voice is speaking. May not there be another with him in the dark to and of whom the voice is speaking? Is he not perhaps overhearing a communication not intended for him? If he is alone on his back in the dark why does the voice not say so? Why does it never say for example, you saw the light on such and such a day and now you are alone on your back in the dark? Why? Perhaps for no other reason than to kindle in his mind this faint uncertainty and embarrassment. ~ Samuel Beckett

[Y]ou cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those and those even less so. ~ Samuel Beckett

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

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

Unhappy, but not unhappy enough. ~ Samuel Beckett

I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit. And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck. ~ Samuel Beckett

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

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. ~ Samuel Beckett

The little cloud drifting before their glorious sun will darken the earth as long as I please. ~ Samuel Beckett

She was willing a little bit of sweated labour, incapable of betraying the slogan of her slavers, that since the customer or sucker was paying for his gutrot ten times what it cost to produce and five times what it cost to fling in his face, it was only reasonable to defer to his complaints up to but not exceeding fifty per cent of his exploitation. ~ Samuel Beckett

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

In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.
Shall I swallow cave-phantoms? ~ Samuel Beckett

We underestimate this little hole, it seems to me, we call it the arsehole and affect to despise it. But is it not rather the true portal of our being and the celebrated mouth no more than the kitchen door ~ Samuel Beckett

If you don't know where you are currently standing, you're dead. ~ Samuel Beckett

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

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

Then a moment passed and all was changed. ~ Samuel Beckett

Birth was the death of him. ~ Samuel Beckett