Samuel Beckett Quotes

236 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Samuel Beckett
What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity. A pity I should have to give tongue at the same time, it prevents it from bleeding in peace, licking the lips.

Samuel Beckett
I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous, and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. 'Nothing is more real than nothing.' They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.

Samuel Beckett
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
No, life ends and no, there is nothing elsewhere, and no question now of ever finding again that white speck lost in whiteness, to see if they still lie still in the stress of that storm, or of a worse storm, or in the black dark for good, or the great whiteness unchanging, and if not what they are doing.

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

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

Samuel Beckett
He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.

Samuel Beckett
Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.

Samuel Beckett
Hamm: There's something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head.

Samuel Beckett
Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.

Samuel Beckett
Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.

Samuel Beckett
Having heard, or more probably read somewhere, in the days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself, or amuse myself, or stupefy myself, or kill time, that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble … and if I did not go in a rigorously straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something.

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

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 couldn't have done it otherwise, gone on I mean. I could not have gone on through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

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
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.

Samuel Beckett
VLADIMIR: What do they say? ESTRAGON: They talk about their lives. VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them. ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it.

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

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

Samuel Beckett
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
Hamm: We're not beginning … to … to … mean something?
Clov: Mean something? You and I mean something?

Samuel Beckett
How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.

Samuel Beckett
Encouraging an actor who thought he had failed:
Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.

Samuel Beckett
Or I might be able to catch one, a little girl for example, and half strangle her, three quarters, until she promises to give me my stick, give me soup, empty my pots, kiss me, fondle me, smile to me, give me my hat, stay with me, follow the hearse weeping into her handkerchief, that would be nice. I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it that nobody ever noticed it?

Samuel Beckett
Ah if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere, just enough to keep alight this little yellow flame feebly darting from side to side, panting, as if straining to tear itself from its wick, it should never have been lit, or it should never have been fed, or it should have been put out, put out, it should have been let go out.

Samuel Beckett
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. I was a solid in the midst of other solids.

Samuel Beckett