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Samuel Beckett
123 quotes
“Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Gnome" in Dublin Magazine Vol. 9 (1934), p. 8
“The only sin is the sin of being born.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Samuel Beckett Talks About Beckett" by John Gruen, in Vogue, (December 1969), p. 210
“If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Essential Samuel Beckett: An Illustrated Biography, by Enoch Brater (revised edition, 2003) , p. 75
“It means what it says.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Said about Waiting for Godot, from Jonathan Croall, The Coming of Godot (2005) , p. 91
“I grow gnomic. It is the last phase.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Letters of Samuel Becket 1929–1940 (2009), p. 209
“I think the next little bit of excitement is flying. I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1906–1989) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Proust (1957), p. 4
“The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tom F. Driver, "Beckett by the Madeleine" (1961), Columbia University Forum 4 (Summer 1961): 21-25; it later appeared in Stanley A. Clayes, ed., Drama and Discussion (1967), pp. 604-7, as quoted in "Rick On Theater" 25 …
“My mother was deeply religious. So was my brother. ... The family was Protestant, but for me it was only irksome and I let it go. My brother and mother got no value from their religion when they died. At the moment of crisis it had no more depth than an old-school tie. Irish Catholicism is not attractive, but it is deeper. When you pass a church on an Irish bus, all the hands flurry in the sign of the cross. One day the dogs of Ireland will do that too and perhaps also the pigs.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Samuel Beckett Talks About Beckett", Vogue Magazine, 1969
“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“God is a witness that cannot be sworn.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consider: the darkening ease, the brightening trouble; the pleasure pleasure because it was, the pain pain because it shall be; the glad acts grown proud, the proud acts growing stubborn; the panting and trembling towards a being gone, a being to come; and the true true no longer, and the false true not yet. And to decide not to smile after all, sitting in the shade, hearing the cicadas, wishing it were night, wishing it were morning, saying, No, it is not the heart, no, it is not the liver, no, it is not the prostate, no, it is not the ovaries, no, it is muscular, it is nervous.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bid us sigh on from day to day, And wish and wish the soul away, Till youth and genial years are flown, And all the life of life is gone.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They were most correct, according to their god.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I felt ill at ease with all this air about me, lost before the confusion of innumerable prospects.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes, I don’t know why, but I have never been disappointed, and I often was in the early days, without feeling at the same time, or a moment later, an undeniable relief.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poor juvenile solutions, explaining nothing. No need then for caution, we may reason on to our heart’s content, the fog won’t lift.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Does one ever know oneself why one laughs?”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All I say cancels out, I’ll have said nothing.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s to me this evening something has to happen, to my body as in myth and metamorphosis, this old body to which nothing ever happened, or so little, which never met with anything, wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter, the plane, the curved, the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To think that in a moment all will be said, all to do again.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I didn’t feel well, but they told me I was well enough. They didn’t say in so many words that I was as well as I would ever be, but that was the implication.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My appearance still made people laugh, with that hearty jovial laugh so good for the health.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I felt weak, perhaps I was.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A mask of dirty old hairy leather, with two holes and a slit, it was too far gone for the old trick of please your honour and God reward you and pity upon me. It was disastrous.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do you ever think? The voice, God forbid.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of — how shall I say, I don’t know.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To contrive a little kingdom, in the midst of the universal muck, then shit on it, ah that was me all over.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By nature I mean here, like the naïvest realist, a composite of perceiver and perceived, not a datum, an experience. All I wish to suggest is that the tendency and accomplishment of this painting are fundamentally those of previous painting, straining to enlarge the statement of a compromise.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Also quoted in "Beckett and Failure", in Realism, Issue 5 (June 2011)
“The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Also quoted in "Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde by Charles Juliet" by Nicholas Lezard, in The Guardian (23 January 2010)
“Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that's always been my motto.”
Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) said by 1989 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source