Samuel Beckett
136 quotes
Biography
"If you do not love me I shall not be loved If I do not love you I shall not love."
"You're on Earth. There's no cure for that."
"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."
"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
"I can't go on, I'll go on."
"The end is in the beginning and yet you go on."
"The only sin is the sin of being born"
"No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found."
"I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had."
"To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten."
"Words are the clothes thoughts wear."
"Spend the years of learning squanderingCourage for the years of wanderingThrough a world politely turningFrom the loutishness of learning."
"Unfathomable mind: now beacon, now sea."
"It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution."
"In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?"
"Ada: And why life? (Pause.) Why life, Henry? (Pause.) Is there anyone about?Henry: Not a living soul.Ada: I thought as much. (Pause.) When we longed to have it to ourselves there was always someone. Now that it does not matter the place is deserted."
"You must go on.I can’t go on.I’ll go on."
"If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot."
"It means what it says."
"I grow gnomic. It is the last phase."
"I think the next little bit of excitement is flying. I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them."
"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."
"The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in."
"My mother was deeply religious. So was my brother. ... The family was Protestant, but for me it was only irksome and I let it go. My brother and mother got no value from their religion when they died. At the moment of crisis it had no more depth than an old-school tie. Irish Catholicism is not attractive, but it is deeper. When you pass a church on an Irish bus, all the hands flurry in the sign of the cross. One day the dogs of Ireland will do that too and perhaps also the pigs.”"
"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."