Samuel Beckett: Likeness

“I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.”

Samuel Beckett

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940 (2009), p. 362
Context: I think the next little bit of excitement is ﬂying. I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.

Life , Books , Feeling , Reading

“By nature I mean here, like the naïvest realist, a composite of perceiver and perceived, not a datum, an experience.”

Samuel Beckett book Three Dialogues

Also quoted in "Beckett and Failure", in Realism, Issue 5 (June 2011) http://www.hypocritereader.com/5/beckett-and-failure
Three Dialogues (1949)
Context: By nature I mean here, like the naïvest realist, a composite of perceiver and perceived, not a datum, an experience. All I wish to suggest is that the tendency and accomplishment of this painting are fundamentally those of previous painting, straining to enlarge the statement of a compromise.

Nature

“Hamm: Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!”

Samuel Beckett

Endgame (1957)

Question

“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)

Men , God , Animals

“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)

Life

“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)

World

“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)

Life , Courage , Memory

“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)

Life , Feeling , Personality

“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)

God , Light , Sun , Night

“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)

Forgetting

“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)

“And once again I am I will not say alone, no, that's not like me, but, how shall I say, I don't know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don't know what that means but it's the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

Law , Business , Water

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”

Samuel Beckett

"Samuel Beckett Talks About Beckett" https://archive.vogue.com/article/1969/12/nobel-prize-winner-1969-samuel-beckett-talks-about-beckett, Vogue Magazine, 1969

Silence