Samuel Beckett Quotes
-
Do you ever think? The voice, God forbid.
-
There is something … more important in life than punctuality, and that is decorum.
-
But is it true love, in the rectum? That’s what bothers me sometimes.
-
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.
-
Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.
-
Tears, that could be the tone, if they weren't so easy, the true tone and tenor at last.
-
The loss of consciousness for me was never any great loss.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I am mistaken, I am mistaken.
-
Poor juvenile solutions, explaining nothing. No need then for caution, we may reason on to our heart’s content, the fog won’t lift.
-
What do you expect, one is what one is, partly at least.
-
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.
-
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.
-
God is a witness that cannot be sworn.
-
Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.
-
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.
-
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.
-
All the things you would do gladly, oh without enthusiasm, but gladly, all the things there seems no reason for your not doing, and that you do not do! Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.
-
Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.
-
I don’t know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.