“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
— Samuel Beckett
“Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.”
“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
“Fail, fail again, fail better.”
“You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.”
“Don’t look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.”
“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.”
“What are we doing here, that is the question.”
“Nothing is more real than nothing.”
“Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.”
“We all are born mad. Some remain so.”
“What do we do now, now that we are happy?”
“Don’t touch me! Don’t question me! Don’t speak to me! Stay with me!”
“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.”
“Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: Yes, yes, we’re magicians.”
“How hideous is the semicolon.”
“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
“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 come.”
“That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.”
“Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.”
“God is love. Yes or no? No.”
“Words are the clothes thoughts wear.”
“People are bloody ignorant apes.”
“Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand.”
“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
“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.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right mind. Then it passes off and I’m as intelligent as ever.”
“They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”
“I am still alive then. That may come in useful.”
“Vladimir: Did I ever leave you? Estragon: You let me go.”
“If I was dead, I wouldn’t know I was dead. That’s the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death.”
“There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.”
“Make sense who may. I switch off.”
“I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.”
“When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.”
“Estragon: I’m like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.”
“If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.”
“I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.”
“Words are all we have.”
“Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings.”
“Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.”
“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.”
“I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.”
“I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.”
“No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.”
“My mistakes are my life.”
“ESTRAGON: I can’t go on like this. VLADIMIR: That’s what you think.”
“All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante.”
“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”
“But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying. I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am.”
“That’s what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.”
“That penny farthing hell you call your mind.”
“There is man in his entirety, blaming his shoe when his foot is guilty.”
“I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.”
“Unfathomable mind: now beacon, now sea.”
“James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.”
“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.”
“Habit is a great deadener.”
“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.”
“Sloth is all passions the most powerful.”
“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.”
“Do we mean love, when we say love?”
“I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.”
“Love requited is a short circuit.”
“The only sin is the sin of being born.”
“The sky sinks in the morning, this fact has been insufficiently observed.”
“Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.”
“Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end.”
“To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.”
“What is that unforgettable line?”
“That double-headed monster of damnation and salvation – Time.”
“Estragon: What about hanging ourselves? Vladimir: Hmm. It’d give us an erection.”
“All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.”
“Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear.”
“The essential doesn’t change.”
“Two in distressmake sorrow less.”
“The reality of the individualis an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently.”
“If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.”
“To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.”
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.”
“Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain amount of both. They being one.”
“Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!”
“Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.”
“The old endless chain of love, tolerance, indifference, aversion and disgust.”
“We spend our life, it’s ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench.”
“The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again.”
“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.”
“We could have saved sixpence. We could have saved fivepence. But at what cost?”
“In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.”
“There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.”
“Words fail, there are times when even they fail.”
“Estragon: Nothing to be done.”
“How time flies when one has fun!”
“Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits.”
“Our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena.”
“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.”
“God is a witness that cannot be sworn.”
“Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.”
“Dying for dark – the darker the worse. Strange.”
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