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Samuel Beckett Quotes
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Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, he wrote in both French and English.

Beckett's work offers a bleak, tragi-comic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd".Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation." He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. April 1906 – 22. December 1989
Samuel Beckett photo
Samuel Beckett: 122 quotes68 likes

Samuel Beckett Quotes

“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)

“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)

“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.”

Samuel Beckett

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.”

Samuel Beckett

Endgame (1957)

“To restore silence is the role of objects.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“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.”

Samuel Beckett

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 &quot;Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde by Charles Juliet&quot; 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.”

Samuel Beckett

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

“It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“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.”

Samuel Beckett

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.”

Samuel Beckett

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)

“Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.”

Samuel Beckett

"Gnome" in Dublin Magazine Vol. 9 (1934), p. 8

“He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.”

Samuel Beckett book Malone Dies

Malone Dies (1951)

“There is something … more important in life than punctuality, and that is decorum.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“Consider: the darkening ease, the brightening trouble; the pleasure pleasure because it was, the pain pain because it shall be; the glad acts grown proud, the proud acts growing stubborn; the panting and trembling towards a being gone, a being to come; and the true true no longer, and the false true not yet. And to decide not to smile after all, sitting in the shade, hearing the cicadas, wishing it were night, wishing it were morning, saying, No, it is not the heart, no, it is not the liver, no, it is not the prostate, no, it is not the ovaries, no, it is muscular, it is nervous.”

Samuel Beckett book Watt

Part III, p. 201
Watt (1943)

“To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.”

Samuel Beckett

The Expelled (1946)

“Ah if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere, just enough to keep alight this little yellow flame feebly darting from side to side, panting, as if straining to tear itself from its wick, it should never have been lit, or it should never have been fed, or it should have been put out, put out, it should have been let go out.”

Samuel Beckett book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

“The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“All this business of a labour to accomplish, before I can end, of words to say, a truth to recover, in order to say it, before I can end, of an imposed task, once known, long neglected, finally forgotten, to perform, before I can be done with speaking, done with listening, I invented it all, in the hope it would console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a road, moving, between a beginning and an end, gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway.”

Samuel Beckett book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

“I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.”

Samuel Beckett

The Calmative (1946)

“These things I say, and shall say, if I can, are no longer, or are not yet, or never were, or never will be, or if they were, if they are, if they will be, were not here, are not here, will not be here, but elsewhere.”

Samuel Beckett book The Unnamable

The Unnamable (1954)

“Krapp: Ah finish your booze now and get to your bed. Go on with this drivel in the morning. Or leave it at that. (Pause.) Leave it at that.”

Samuel Beckett Krapp's Last Tape

Krapp's Last Tape (1958)

“I felt weak, perhaps I was.”

Samuel Beckett

The End (1946)

“All I say cancels out, I’ll have said nothing.”

Samuel Beckett

The Calmative (1946)