Samuel Beckett quotes - page 2

What can it matter to me, that I succeed or fail? The undertaking is none of mine, if they want me to succeed I'll fail, and vice versa, so as not to be rid of my tormentors. (Samuel Beckett)
Hamm: There's something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head.
Samuel Beckett
Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.
Samuel Beckett
The essential is to go on squirming forever at the end of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting god to plague his creatures, per pro his chosen shits.
Samuel Beckett
I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.
Samuel Beckett
God is a witness that cannot be sworn.
Samuel Beckett
Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.
Samuel Beckett
It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger.
Samuel Beckett
Nothing is more real than nothing.
Samuel Beckett
If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.
Samuel Beckett
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. (Samuel Beckett)
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
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).
Samuel Beckett
Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.
Samuel Beckett
I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.
Samuel Beckett
I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.
Samuel Beckett
Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what.
Samuel Beckett
My keepers, why keepers, I'm in no danger of stirring an inch, ah I see, it's to make me think I'm a prisoner, frantic with corporeality, rearing to get out and away.
Samuel Beckett
They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance.
Samuel Beckett
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.
Samuel Beckett
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. (Samuel Beckett)
The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow.
Samuel Beckett
To restore silence is the role of objects.
Samuel Beckett
It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.
Samuel Beckett
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.
Samuel Beckett