Samuel Beckett Quotations | Page 3

Make sense who may. I switch off.

Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.

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

Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. Gently gently. On. Careful.

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.

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.

I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.

God is a witness that cannot be sworn.

It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.

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.

How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?

All I say cancels out, I’ll have said nothing.

To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.

The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too.

I am still alive then. That may come in useful.

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.

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

There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind.

It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger.

Birth was the death of him.

Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.

Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again.

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.

So all things limp together for the only possible.

Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place...that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end.

The essential doesn't change.

I had little talent for happiness.

It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.

All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.

Estragon: What about hanging ourselves? Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.

The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter. And at the same time I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never.

I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it that nobody ever noticed it?

Fail, fail again, fail better.

Do you always believe in the life to come? Mine was always that.

I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.

Women are all the bloody sameyou can't love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery.

It's a lot to ask of one creature, it's a lot to ask, that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions.

Words fail, there are times when even they fail.

Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher's regular, what normal woman wants affection?

I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.

The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).

But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!

To restore silence is the role of objects.

Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.

The sky sinks in the morning, this fact has been insufficiently observed.

But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something.

Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, words have been my only loves, not many.

And what I have, what I am, is enough, was always enough for me, and as far as my dear little sweet little future is concerned I have no qualms, I have a good time coming.

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.

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.

The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.

All mankind is us, whether we like it or not.

Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.

What is more true than anything else? To swim is true and to sink is true. One cannot speak any more of being, one must speak onlyof the mess.

We could have saved sixpence. We could have saved fivepence. But at what cost?

But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.

What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.

Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede.

Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.

Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.

Two in distressmake sorrow less.

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.

Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.

To what will love not stoop!

Perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong to either.

We spend our life, it's ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench

For 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.

When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.

People are bloody ignorant apes.

In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe.

Watt's concern, deep as it appeared, was not after all what the figure was, in reality, but with what the figure appeared to be, in reality.

Estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.

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.

Words are all we have.

My mistakes are my life.

The old endless chain of love, tolerance, indifference, aversion and disgust

All life long, the same questions, the same answers.

The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering-that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom ... that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils.

As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places.

Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.

Humbly to ask a favour of people who are on the point of knocking your brains out sometimes produces good results.

We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.

That double-headed monster of damnation and salvation--Time.

There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.

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.)

Nothing is more real than nothing.

Vladimir: Did I ever leave you? Estragon: You let me go.

Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.

Against the charitable gesture there is no defence.

But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.

Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand.

If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.

Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was but that I was, forgot to be.

All this business of a labour to accomplish, before I can end, of words to say, a truth to recover, in order to say it, before I can end, of an imposed task, once known, long neglected, finally forgotten, to perform, before I can be done with speaking, done with listening, I invented it all, in the hope it would console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a road, moving, between a beginning and an end, gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway.

The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

How long have I been here, what a question, I've often wondered. And often I could answer, An hour, a month, a year, a century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being, and there I never went looking for extravagant meanings, there I never much varied, only the here would sometimes seem to vary.

Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.

The day that you die will be like any other day...only shorter.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.