Samuel Beckett
Estragon: What about hanging ourselves? Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.Collection: Giving
Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passionate and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars.Collection: Spiritual
I try. I fail. I try again. I fail better.Collection: Trying
We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Dream
James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.Collection: Writing
Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.Collection: Loneliness
The end of a life is always vivifying.Collection: Life
They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance.Collection: Baby
We could have saved sixpence. We could have saved fivepence. But at what cost?Collection: Art
it's impossible I should have a mind and I have oneCollection: Thoughtful
To find a form that accommodates the shape of the mess, that is the task of the artist now.Collection: Artist
How hideous is the semicolon.Collection: Hideous
Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others. So you get up and go to your mother, who thinks she is alive. That's my impression. But now I shall have to get myself out of this ditch. How joyfully I would vanish here, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains.Collection: Mother
Make sense who may. I switch off.Collection: May
You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other.Collection: Literature
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Eye
The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).Collection: Eye
Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!Collection: Answers
I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.Collection: Eye
We all are born mad. Some remain so.Collection: Mad
And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.Collection: Heart
Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.Collection: Suffering
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.Collection: Thinking
There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Mind
Lick your neighbor as yourself!Collection: Love
I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Love
Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what.Collection: Mania
All I say cancels out, I’ll have said nothing.Collection: Said
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.Collection: Soul
It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.Collection: Nice
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.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Time
Yes, light, there is no other word for it.Collection: Light
There's no lack of void.Collection: Void
She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.Collection: Next
Enough to know no knowing.Collection: Knowledge
You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.Collection: Looks
My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.Collection: Responsibility
POZZO: I am blind. (Silence.) ESTRAGON: Perhaps he can see into the future.Collection: Silence
What kind of country is this where a woman can't weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!Collection: Country
The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.Collection: Our Generation
How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.Collection: Saving Up
Estragon: Suppose we repented. Vladimir: Repented what? Estragon: Oh...(He reflects.) We wouldn’t have to go into the details. Vladimir: Our being born?Collection: Details