Samuel Beckett: Trending quotes (page 5)

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“To restore silence is the role of objects.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”