Samuel Beckett citations

Page 2

“Maximum de simplicité et de symétrie. Lumière aveuglante.”

“Ces Murphy, Molloy, et autres Malone, je n'en suis pas dupe. Ils m'ont fait perdre mon temps […] Ils n'ont pas souffert mes douleurs, leurs douleurs ne sont rien, à côté des miennes, rien qu'une petite partie des miennes, celle dont je croyais pouvoir me détacher, pour la contempler.”

“Je sentais l’âme qui s’ennuie vite et n’achève jamais rien, qui est de toutes peut-être la moins emmerdante.”

“Les larmes ruissellent le long de mes joues sans que j'éprouve le besoin de cligner les yeux. Qu'est-ce qui me fait pleurer ainsi? De temps en temps. Il n'y a rien ici qui puisse m'attrister. C'est peut-être de la cervelle liquéfiée.”

“Ce qui fait le charme de notre pays, à part bien entendu le fait qu’il est peu peuplé, malgré l’impossibilité de s’y procurer le moindre préservatif, c’est que tout y est à l’abandon sauf les vieilles selles de l’histoire.”

“Clov: When I fall I'll weep for happiness.”

“God is a witness that cannot be sworn.”

“There is a little of everything, apparently, in nature, and freaks are common.”

“The long blue days, for his head, for his side, and the little paths for his feet, and all the brightness to touch and gather. Through the grass the little mosspaths, bony with old roots, and the trees sticking up, and the flowers sticking up, and the fruit hanging down, and the white exhausted butterflies, and the birds never the same darting all day long into hiding. And all the sounds, meaning nothing. Then at night rest in the quiet house, there are no roads, no streets any more, you lie down by a window opening on refuge, the little sounds come that demand nothing, ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the short necessary night is soon ended, and the sky blue again all over the secret places where nobody ever comes, the secret places never the same, but always simple and indifferent, always mere places, sites of a stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so light and free that it is as the being of nothing.”

“They were most correct, according to their god.”

“Do you ever think? The voice, God forbid.”

“Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.”

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

“If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.”

“Hamm: If I could sleep I might make love. I'd go into the woods. My eyes would see … the sky, the earth. I'd run, run, they wouldn't catch me.”

“Hamm: Can there be misery (he yawns) loftier than mine?”

“I felt ill at ease with all this air about me, lost before the confusion of innumerable prospects.”

“How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast.”

“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.”

“Bah, the latest news, the latest news is not the last.”

“My appearance still made people laugh, with that hearty jovial laugh so good for the health.”

“Poor juvenile solutions, explaining nothing. No need then for caution, we may reason on to our heart’s content, the fog won’t lift.”

“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.”

“No way in, go in, measure.”

“The short winter’s day was drawing to a close. It seems to me sometimes that these are the only days I have ever known, and especially that most charming moment of all, just before night wipes them out.”

“How tell what remains? But it’s the end. Or have I been dreaming, am I dreaming? No no, none of that, for dream is nothing, a joke, and significant what is worse.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The loss of consciousness for me was never any great loss.”

“Does one ever know oneself why one laughs?”

“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.”

“Hamm: We're not beginning … to … to … mean something?
Clov: Mean something? You and I mean something?”

“But he had hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the one hand, and the necessity of those others, on the other (for it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity), when he felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity).”

“But is it true love, in the rectum? That’s what bothers me sometimes.”