Samuel Beckett: Quotes about life

“I wish them all an atrocious life and then the fires and ice of hell and in the execrable generations to come an honoured name.”

Samuel Beckett book Malone Dies

Malone Dies (1951)
Context: Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life and then the fires and ice of hell and in the execrable generations to come an honoured name.

Life , Hell

“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

“No, life ends and no, there is nothing elsewhere, and no question now of ever finding again that white speck lost in whiteness, to see if they still lie still in the stress of that storm, or of a worse storm, or in the black dark for good, or the great whiteness unchanging, and if not what they are doing.”

Samuel Beckett book Imagination Dead Imagine

Imagination Dead Imagine (1965)

Life , Lie , Question

“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

“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)