Samuel Beckett Quotes

Yes, light, there is no other word for it.

I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.

You 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.

Where am I, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

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.

It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.

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

We always find something, eh Didi, to let us think we exist?

Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.

I try. I fail. I try again. I fail better.

Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment.

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

There's no lack of void.

We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.

Love requited is a short circuit.

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

in reality we are one and all from the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh without breach or fissure

I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.

To find a form that accommodates the shape of the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

How hideous is the semicolon.

There is this to be said for Dachsunds of such length and lowness as Nelly, that it makes very little difference to their appearance whether they stand, sit or lie.

We are all born; some remain so.

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.

Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!

I cannot explain my plays. Each must find out for himself what is meant

Was I asleep? Had I slept?

You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness.

Light black. From pole to pole.

Dying for dark — and the darker the Worse. Strange.

I 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.

The end of a life is always vivifying.

My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don't understand how it can be endured.

Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most

I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark forever.

Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.

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

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

Estragon: Nothing to be done.

That penny farthing hell you call your mind

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.

Do they [the publishers of Murphy] not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and thatto compress it further can only make it more obscure?

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

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

God is love. Yes or no? No.

Adulterers, take warning, never admit.

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

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

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.

Lick your neighbor as yourself!

We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties.