Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “The fact would seem to be, if in my situation one may speak of facts, not only that I shall have to speak of things of which I cannot speak, but also, which is even more interesting, but also that I, which is if possible even more interesting, that I shall have to, I forget, no matter. And at the same time I am obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never.”

— Samuel Beckett

252. “The corner in which he sat was curtained off from the sun, the poor old sun in the Virgin for the billionth time.”

— Samuel Beckett

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

256. “All I say cancels out, I’ll have said nothing.”

— Samuel Beckett

257. “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

258. “But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.”

— Samuel Beckett

259. “Incontinent the void. The zenith. Evening again. When not night it will be evening. Death again of deathless day. On one hand embers. On the other ashes. Day without end won and lost. Unseen.”

— Samuel Beckett

260. “My keepers, why keepers, I’m in no danger of stirring an inch, ah I see, it’s to make me think I’m a prisoner, frantic with corporeality, rearing to get out and away.”

— Samuel Beckett

261. “I didn’t understand women at that period. I still don’t for that matter. Nor men either. Nor animals either. What I understand best, which is not saying much, are my pains.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

266. “Unhappy, but not unhappy enough.”

— Samuel Beckett

267. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

269. “But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.”

— Samuel Beckett

270. “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.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

276. “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

277. “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

278. “I shall be neutral and inert. No difficulty there. Throes are the only trouble, I must be on my guard against throes. But I am less given to them now, since coming here.”

— Samuel Beckett

279. “Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle.”

— Samuel Beckett

280. “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

281. “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

282. “What counts is to be in the world, the posture is immaterial, so long as one is on earth. To breathe is all that is required.”

— Samuel Beckett

283. “All roads were right for me, a wrong road was an event, for me.”

— Samuel Beckett

284. “Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.”

— Samuel Beckett

285. “They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance.”

— Samuel Beckett

286. “Having oscillated all his life between the torments of a superficial loitering and the horrors of disinterested endeavour, he finds himself at last in a situation where to do nothing exclusively would be an act of the highest value, and significance.”

— Samuel Beckett

287. “I am interested in the shape of ideas, even if I do not believe in them.”

— Samuel Beckett

288. “What am I doing now, I’m trying to see where I am, so as to be able to go elsewhere, should occasion arise, or else simply to say, You have merely to wait till they come and fetch you, that’s my impression at times.”

— Samuel Beckett

289. “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

290. “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

291. “Nowhere in particular on the way from A to Z. Or say for verisimilitude the Balloygan Road. That dear old back road. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road in lieu of nowhere in particular. Where no truck anymore. Somewhere on the Ballyogan Road on the way from A to Z.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

294. “We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

296. “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

297. “Nothing to be done...”

— Samuel Beckett

298. “Who knows what dirty story, what even better dirty story, it may even be one we have not heard before, told at some colossal pitch of pure smut, beats at this moment in vain against our eardrums.”

— Samuel Beckett

299. “As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places.”

— Samuel Beckett

300. “An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.”

— Samuel Beckett