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Samuel Beckett: 244 quotes68 likes

“If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.”

As quoted in The Essential Samuel Beckett: An Illustrated Biography, by Enoch Brater (revised edition, 2003) ISBN 0-500-28411-3, p. 75

“Hamm: If I could sleep I might make love. I'd go into the woods. My eyes would see … the sky, the earth. I'd run, run, they wouldn't catch me.”

Samuel Beckett

Endgame (1957)

“Hamm: Can there be misery (he yawns) loftier than mine?”

Samuel Beckett

Endgame (1957)

“I felt ill at ease with all this air about me, lost before the confusion of innumerable prospects.”

Samuel Beckett

The Expelled (1946)

“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 book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

“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.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“Bah, the latest news, the latest news is not the last.”

Samuel Beckett book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

“My appearance still made people laugh, with that hearty jovial laugh so good for the health.”

Samuel Beckett

The End (1946)

“Poor juvenile solutions, explaining nothing. No need then for caution, we may reason on to our heart’s content, the fog won’t lift.”

Samuel Beckett

The Expelled (1946)

“No, life ends and no, there is nothing elsewhere, and no question now of ever finding again that white speck lost in whiteness, to see if they still lie still in the stress of that storm, or of a worse storm, or in the black dark for good, or the great whiteness unchanging, and if not what they are doing.”

Samuel Beckett book Imagination Dead Imagine

Imagination Dead Imagine (1965)

“No way in, go in, measure.”

Samuel Beckett book Imagination Dead Imagine

Imagination Dead Imagine (1965)

“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

The Expelled (1946)

“How tell what remains? But it’s the end. Or have I been dreaming, am I dreaming? No no, none of that, for dream is nothing, a joke, and significant what is worse.”

Samuel Beckett

The Calmative (1946)

“Here's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.”

Samuel Beckett book Texts for Nothing

Texts for Nothing (1955)

“Nell: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.Nagg: Oh?Nell: 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 Beckett

Endgame (1957)

“The loss of consciousness for me was never any great loss.”

Samuel Beckett book Malone Dies

Malone Dies (1951)

“Does one ever know oneself why one laughs?”

Samuel Beckett

The Expelled (1946)

“The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.”

Samuel Beckett

The End (1946)

“Hamm: We're not beginning … to … to … mean something?
Clov: Mean something? You and I mean something?”

Samuel Beckett

Endgame (1957)

“But he had hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the one hand, and the necessity of those others, on the other (for it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity), when he felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity).”

Samuel Beckett book Watt

Part II, p. 133
Watt (1943)