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Samuel Beckett: 244 quotes68 likes

“Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“To go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.”

Samuel Beckett book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

“Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that's always been my motto.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.”

Samuel Beckett book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

“I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.”

Samuel Beckett

The End (1946)

“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.”

Samuel Beckett book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

“Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what.”

Samuel Beckett book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

“My keepers, why keepers, I'm in no danger of stirring an inch, ah I see, it's to make me think I'm a prisoner, frantic with corporeality, rearing to get out and away.”

Samuel Beckett book Texts for Nothing

Texts for Nothing (1955)

“We are no longer the same, you wiser but not sadder, and I sadder but not wiser, for wiser I could hardly become without grave personal inconvenience, whereas sorrow is a thing you can keep adding to all your life long, is it not, like a stamp or an egg collection, without feeling very much the worse for it, is it not.”

Samuel Beckett book Watt

Part I, p. 50
Watt (1943)

“I get up, go out, and everything is changed. The blood drains from my head, the noise of things bursting, merging, avoiding one another, assails me on all sides, my eyes search in vain for two things alike, each pinpoint of skin screams a different message, I drown in the spray of phenomena.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“Hamm: What's he doing?(CLOV raises lid of NAGG's bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.)Clov: He's crying.(He closes lid, straightens up)Hamm: Then he's living.”

Samuel Beckett

Endgame (1957)

“Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, 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 book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

“At no moment do I know what I’m talking about, nor of whom, nor of where, nor how, nor why, but I could employ fifty wretches for this sinister operation and still be short of the fifty-first, to close the circuit, that I know, without knowing what it means.”

Samuel Beckett book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

“But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.”

Samuel Beckett book Watt

Part II, p. 117
Watt (1943)

“They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance.”

Samuel Beckett

The Expelled (1946)

“Tears, that could be the tone, if they weren't so easy, the true tone and tenor at last.”

Samuel Beckett book Texts for Nothing

Texts for Nothing (1955)

“What do you expect, one is what one is, partly at least.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“A mask of dirty old hairy leather, with two holes and a slit, it was too far gone for the old trick of please your honour and God reward you and pity upon me. It was disastrous.”

Samuel Beckett

The End (1946)

“Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken.”

Samuel Beckett book Three Dialogues

Three Dialogues (1949)