Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I’d been saving up for her all my life.”

— Samuel Beckett

202. “I’ll make myself a memory, I have only to listen, the voice will tell me everything, tell it to me again, everything I need, in dribs and drabs, breathless, it’s like a confession, a last confession, you think it’s finished, then it starts off again, there were so many sins, the memory is so bad, the words don’t come, the words fail, the breath fails...”

— Samuel Beckett

203. “It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through – I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.”

— Samuel Beckett

204. “Yes, light, there is no other word for it.”

— Samuel Beckett

205. “It’s a rare thing not to have been bonny – once.”

— Samuel Beckett

206. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

207. “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!”

— Samuel Beckett

208. “It’s so nice to know where you’re going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.”

— Samuel Beckett

209. “At last I began to think, that is to say to listen harder.”

— Samuel Beckett

210. “And is it not strange most strange that one says of a thing that it is full, when it is not full at all, but not of a thing that is empty, if it is not empty? And perhaps the reason for that is this, that when one fills, one seldom fills quite full, for that would not be convenient, whereas when one empties one empties completely, holding the vessel upside down, and rinsing it out with boiling water if necessary, with a kind of fury.”

— Samuel Beckett

211. “It’s not nice of you, Didi. Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell them to you?”

— Samuel Beckett

212. “I cannot explain my plays. Each must find out for himself what is meant.”

— Samuel Beckett

213. “Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.”

— Samuel Beckett

214. “Unhappy, but not unhappy enough.”

— Samuel Beckett

215. “My mother. I don’t think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers.”

— Samuel Beckett

216. “Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have begun.”

— Samuel Beckett

217. “You think you are simply resting, the better to act when the time comes, or for no reason, and you soon find yourself powerless ever to do anything again.”

— Samuel Beckett

218. “James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.”

— Samuel Beckett

219. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

220. “Neary’s conception of friendship was very curious. He expected it to last. He never said, when speaking of an enemy: “He used to be a friend of mine”, but always, with affected precision: “I used to think he was a friend of mine.”

— Samuel Beckett

221. “It was December, I had never felt so cold, the eel soup lay heavy on my stomach, I was afraid I’d die, I turned aside to vomit, I envied them.”

— Samuel Beckett

222. “But is it true love, in the rectum?”

— Samuel Beckett

223. “Wherever nauseated time has dropped a nice fat turd you will find our patriots, sniffing it up on all fours, their faces on fire.”

— Samuel Beckett

224. “I wandered in my mind, slowly, noting every detail of the labyrinth, its paths as familiar as those of my garden and yet ever new, as empty as the heart could wish or alive with strange encounters.”

— Samuel Beckett

225. “And but for the company of these little objects which I picked up here and there, when out walking, and which sometimes gave me the impression that they too needed me, I might have been reduced to the society of nice people or to the consolations of some religion or other, but I think not.”

— Samuel Beckett

226. “You are on your back at the foot of an aspen. In its trembling shade. She at right angles propped on her elbows head between her hands. Your eyes opened and closed have looked in hers looking in yours. In your dark you look in them again. Still. You feel on your face the fringe of her long black hair stirring in the still air. Within the tent of hair your faces are hidden from view. She murmurs, Listen to the leaves. Eyes in each other’s eyes you listen to the leaves. In their trembling shade.”

— Samuel Beckett

227. “It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.”

— Samuel Beckett

228. “I shall not speak of my sufferings. Cowering deep down among them I feel nothing. It is there I die, unbeknown to my stupid flesh. That which is seen, that which cries and writhes, my witless remains. Somewhere in this turmoil thought struggles on, it too wide of the mark. It too seeks me, as it always has, where I am not to be found. It too cannot be quiet. On others let it wreak its dying rage, and leave me in peace.”

— Samuel Beckett

229. “I them, the master, myself, we are all innocent, enough. Innocent of what, no one knows, of wanting to know, wanting to be able, of all this noise about nothing, of this long sin against the silence that enfolds us, we wont ask any more, what it covers, this innocence we have fallen to, it covers everything, all faults, all questions, it puts an end to questions.”

— Samuel Beckett

230. “Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment.”

— Samuel Beckett

231. “Nothing to be done...”

— Samuel Beckett

232. “We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist.”

— Samuel Beckett

233. “Against the charitable gesture there is no defence.”

— Samuel Beckett

234. “So to every man, soon or late, comes envy of the fly, with all the long joys of summer before it.”

— Samuel Beckett

235. “For he who has once had to listen will listen always, whether he knows he will never hear anything again, or whether he does not. In other words, they like other words, no doubt about it, silence once broken will never again be whole.”

— Samuel Beckett

236. “Where you have nothing, there you should want nothing.”

— Samuel Beckett

237. “They forget, they think they change and they never change, they’ll be there saying the same thing till they die, then perhaps a little silence, till the next gang arrives on the site.”

— Samuel Beckett

238. “For why be discouraged, one of the thieves was saved, that is a generous percentage.”

— Samuel Beckett

239. “The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.”

— Samuel Beckett

240. “Seen no matter how and said as seen. Dread of black. Of white. Of void. Let her vanish. And the rest. For good.”

— Samuel Beckett

241. “I did not know where to begin nor where to end, that’s the truth of the matter.”

— Samuel Beckett

242. “On. Stare on. Say on. Be on. Somehow on. Anyhow on. Till dim gone. At long last gone. All at long last gone.”

— Samuel Beckett

243. “I weep without interruption. It’s an unbroken flow of words and tears. With no pause for reflection. But I speak softer, every year a little softer. Perhaps. Slower too, every year a little slower. Perhaps. it is hard for me to judge. If so the pauses would be longer, between the words, the sentences, the syllables, the tears, I confuse them, the words and tears, my words are my tears, my eyes my mouth.”

— Samuel Beckett

244. “The end of a life is always vivifying.”

— Samuel Beckett

245. “Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.”

— Samuel Beckett

246. “Curiosity is the hair of our habit tending to stand on end. It rarely happens that our attention is not stained in greater or lesser degree by this animal element.”

— Samuel Beckett

247. “Adulterers, take warning, never admit.”

— Samuel Beckett

248. “She had at least the anagram of a good face.”

— Samuel Beckett

249. “It is easier to raise a shrine than bring the deity down to haunt it.”

— Samuel Beckett

250. “For what is this shadow of the going in which we come, this shadow of the coming in which we go, this shadow of the coming and the going in which we wait, if not the shadow of purpose, of the purpose that budding withers, that withering buds, whose blooming is a budding withering.”

— Samuel Beckett