Samuel Beckett
How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?Collection: God
We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.Collection: Air
What can it matter to me, that I succeed or fail ? The undertaking is none of mine, if they want me to succeed I'll fail, and vice versa, so as not to be rid of my tormentors.Collection: Mentor
Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.Collection: Success
For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.Collection: Two
We are all born; some remain so.Collection: Psychological
It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.Collection: Suicide
Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.Collection: Misery
Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.Collection: Death
Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it for the time needed for it to love it and you it, then throw it away.Collection: Love
Light black. From pole to pole.Collection: Light
I cannot explain my plays. Each must find out for himself what is meantCollection: Play
There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.Collection: Writing
You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness.Collection: Fall
Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.Collection: Humanity
The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.Collection: Littles
That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.Collection: Love
Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.Collection: Dance
Don’t look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.Collection: Silence
Where am I, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.Collection: Silence
Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right mind. Then it passes off and I’m as intelligent as ever.Collection: Intelligent
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.Collection: Real
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: Stories
That’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.Collection: Stories
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