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.Collection: Animal
What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?Collection: Love
Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.Collection: Lightning
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.Collection: Sadness
There is man in his entirety, blaming his shoe when his foot is guilty.Collection: Men
How time flies when one has fun!Collection: Fun
My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don't understand how it can be endured.Collection: Writing
I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.Collection: Moving
What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to comeCollection: Blessed
That passed the time. It would have passed in any case. Yes, but not so rapidly.Collection: Time
There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind.Collection: Art
Hardly had the glow been kindled by some good deed on your part or by some little triumph over your rivals or by a word of praisefrom your parents or mentors when it would begin to cool and fade leaving you in a very short time as chill and dim as before.Collection: Achievement
Try again. Fail again. Try better.Collection: Perseverance
All that is active, all that is enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might be described as an abstract, ideal and absolute impermeability.Collection: Reality
Estragon: Nothing to be done.Collection: Done
The loss of my sight was a great fillip. If I could go deaf and dumb I think I might pant on to be a hundred.Collection: Loss
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 asporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits.Collection: God
Adulterers, take warning, never admit.Collection: Warning
We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties.Collection: Art
In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg. Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?Collection: Names
It's a rare thing not to have been bonny-- once.Collection: Has Beens
We always find something, eh Didi, to let us think we exist?Collection: Thinking
Let us do something, while we have the chance! ... Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!Collection: Fate
...and a dream away in space with neither her nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away. Nor for in the end again by degrees or as though switched on dark falls there again that certain dark that alone certain ashes can. Through it who knows yet another end beneath a cloudless sky of a last end if ever there had to be another absolutely had to be.Collection: Dream
[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.Collection: Life
Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my mostCollection: Dark
I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark forever.Collection: Dark
Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.Collection: Breathing
My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record.Collection: Records
I asked her to look at me and after a few moments - (pause) - after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low) Let me in.Collection: Eye
HAMM: We're not beginning to... to... mean something? CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!Collection: Mean
I speak for an art ... weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Ends
Do they [the publishers of Murphy] not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and thatto compress it further can only make it more obscure?Collection: Book
Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don't know, I shouldn't have begun.Collection: Names
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.Collection: Enough
Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning.Collection: Years
That penny farthing hell you call your mindCollection: Mind
Vladimir: I don't understand. Estragon: Use your intelligence, can't you? Vladimir uses his intelligence. Vladimir: (finally) I remain in the dark.Collection: Dark
Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.Collection: Sea
Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.Collection: Waiting
Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.Collection: Fire
Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.Collection: Art
Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.Collection: Laughter
I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was supposed to consist. And my father's face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?Collection: Beautiful
The reality of the individualis an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently.Collection: Reality