Irish novelist & playwright (1906-1989)
Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.
SAMUEL BECKETT
Endgame
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 Unnamable
You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.
SAMUEL BECKETT
Endgame
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
The Expelled
Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.
SAMUEL BECKETT
Endgame
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
Endgame
I speak as though it all happened yesterday. Yesterday indeed is recent, but not enough. For what I tell this evening is passing this evening, at this passing hour. I'm no longer with these assassins, in this bed of terror, but in my distant refuge, my hands twined together, my head bowed, weak, breathless, calm, free, and older than I'll have ever been, if my calculations are correct.
SAMUEL BECKETT
"The Calmative", Samuel Beckett: Poems
The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.
SAMUEL BECKETT
The Unnamable
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
The End
Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won't come this evening but surely tomorrow.
SAMUEL BECKETT
Waiting for Godot
To restore silence is the role of objects.
SAMUEL BECKETT
Molloy
To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.
SAMUEL BECKETT
Molloy
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.
SAMUEL BECKETT
The Unnamable
But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.
SAMUEL BECKETT
Watt
There's nothing so bad that it can't grow worse. There's no limit to how bad things can be.
SAMUEL BECKETT
"A Remembrance of Samuel Beckett", The Paris Review, spring 1997
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
Proust
I grow gnomic. It is the last phase.
SAMUEL BECKETT
The Letters of Samuel Becket 1929-1940
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
Watt
Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. (Pause.) Let us not speak well of it either. (Pause.) Let us not speak of it at all. (Pause.) It is true the population has increased.
SAMUEL BECKETT
Waiting for Godot
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
Malone Dies