Quotes from book
Molloy

Name: Molloy
Author: Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett Original title Molloy (French, 1951)

Molloy is a novel by Samuel Beckett first written in French and published by Paris-based Les Éditions de Minuit in 1951. The English translation, published in 1955, is by Beckett and Patrick Bowles.

“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)

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

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“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)

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

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that's always been my motto.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“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)

“What do you expect, one is what one is, partly at least.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“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)

“To restore silence is the role of objects.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“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)

“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)

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

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

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

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“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)

“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)

“What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)
Context: What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can. But mostly I shall use the various tenses of the past. For mostly I do not know, it is perhaps no longer so, it is too soon to know, I simply do not know, perhaps shall never know.

“Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)
Context: And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.