Samuel Beckett: Trending quotes

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Samuel Beckett: 244 quotes68 likes

“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 book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

“Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“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.”

The Expelled (1946)

“The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow.”

Samuel Beckett book Proust

Proust (1957), p. 4

“Krapp: Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now.”

Samuel Beckett Krapp's Last Tape

Krapp's Last Tape (1958)

“Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.”

Samuel Beckett From an Abandoned Work

From an Abandoned Work (1957)

“Hamm: There's something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head.”

Endgame (1957)

“To restore silence is the role of objects.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.”

The End (1946)

“For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.”

Samuel Beckett book Watt

Part II, p. 77
Watt (1943)

“Hamm: Look at the ocean!(Clov gets down, takes a few steps towards window left, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, turns the telescope on the without, looks at length. He starts, lowers the telescope, examines it, turns it again on the without.)Clov: Never seen anything like that!Hamm (anxious): What? A sail? A fin? Smoke?Clov (looking): The light is sunk. Hamm (relieved): Pah! We all knew that. Clov (looking): There was a bit left. Hamm: The base. Clov (looking): Yes. Hamm: And now? Clov (looking): All gone. Hamm: No gulls? Clov (looking): Gulls! Hamm: And the horizon? Nothing on the horizon? Clov (lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, exasperated): What in God's name could there be on the horizon? (Pause.) Hamm: The waves, how are the waves? Clov: The waves? (He turns the telescope on the waves.) Lead. Hamm: And the sun? Clov (looking): Zero. Hamm: But it should be sinking. Look again. Clov (looking): Damn the sun. Hamm: Is it night already then? Clov (looking): No. Hamm: Then what is it? Clov (looking): Gray. (Lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, louder.) Gray! (Pause. Still louder.) GRRAY! (Pause. He gets down, approaches Hamm from behind, whispers in his ear.) Hamm (starting): Gray! Did I hear you say gray? Clov: Light black. From pole to pole.”

An explanation of the universe outside the room of Endgame
Endgame (1957)

“Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”

Samuel Beckett book Three Dialogues

Also quoted in "Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde by Charles Juliet" by Nicholas Lezard, in The Guardian (23 January 2010) http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/23/conversations-samuel-beckett-van-velde <br class="br">Three Dialogues (1949)

“I grow gnomic. It is the last phase.”

The Letters of Samuel Becket 1929–1940 (2009), p. 209

“To know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“In me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“To think that in a moment all will be said, all to do again.”

The Calmative (1946)

“It’s to me this evening something has to happen, to my body as in myth and metamorphosis, this old body to which nothing ever happened, or so little, which never met with anything, wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter, the plane, the curved, the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images.”

The Calmative (1946)

“Bid us sigh on from day to day,
And wish and wish the soul away,
Till youth and genial years are flown,
And all the life of life is gone.”

Samuel Beckett book Watt

Addenda, p. 248
Watt (1943)

“This place, if I could describe this place, no place around me, there’s no end to me, I don’t know what it is, it isn’t flesh, it doesn’t end, it’s like air…”

Samuel Beckett book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)