Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “Yes it sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger. Then I see the sky different from what it is and the earth too takes on false colours. It looks like rest, it is not, I vanish happy in that alien light, which must have once been mine, I am willing to believe it, then the anguish of return, I won’t say where, I can’t, to absence perhaps, you must return, that’s all I know, it’s misery to stay, misery to go.”

— Samuel Beckett

352. “What is certain is this, that I never rested in that way again, my feet obscenely resting on the earth, my arms on the handlebars and on my arms my head, rocking and abandoned. It is indeed a delporable sight, a deplorable example, for the people, who so need to be encouraged, in their bitter toil, and to have before their eyes manifestations of strength only, of courage and joy, without which they might collapse, at the end of the day, and roll on the ground.”

— Samuel Beckett

353. “Then he was sorry he had not learnt the art of thinking, beginning by folding back the second and third fingers the better to put the index on the subject and the little finger on the verb, in the way his teacher had shown him, and sorry he could make no meaning of the babel, raging in his head, the doubts, desires, imaginings and dreads.”

— Samuel Beckett

354. “There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.”

— Samuel Beckett

355. “One is no longer oneself, on such occasions, and it is painful to be no longer oneself, even more painful if possible than when one is. For when one is one knows what to do to be less so, whereas when one is not one is any old one irredeemably.”

— Samuel Beckett

356. “Why then the human voice, rather than a hyena’s howls or the clanging of a hammer? Answer, so that the shock may not be too great, when the writhings of true lips meet his gaze. Between them they find a rejoinder to everything. And how they enjoy talking, they know there is no worse torment, for one not in the conversation.”

— Samuel Beckett

357. “For I had no illusions, I knew that all was about to end, or to begin again, it little mattered which, and it little mattered how, I had only to wait.”

— Samuel Beckett

358. “The function of treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of discrete particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable balanced manner, and comfort himself with the society of others in the same predicament.”

— Samuel Beckett

359. “I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark forever.”

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

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

— Samuel Beckett

362. “It was in this byre, littered with dry and hollow cowclaps subsiding with a sigh at the poke of my finger, that for the first time in my life, and I would not hesitate to say the last if I had not to husband my cyanide, I had to contend with a feeling which gradually assumed, to my dismay, the dread name of love.”

— Samuel Beckett

363. “We are no longer the same, you wiser but not sadder, and I sadder but not wiser, for wiser I could hardly become without grave personal inconvenience, whereas sorrow is a thing you can keep adding to all your life long, is it not, like a stamp or an egg collection, without feeling very much the worse for it, is it not.”

— Samuel Beckett

364. “No choice but stand. Somehow up and stand. Somehow stand. That or groan. The groan so long on its way. No. No groan. Simply pain. Simply up. A time when try how. Try see. Try say. How first it lay. Then somehow knelt. Bit by bit. Then on from there. Bit by bit. Till up at last.”

— Samuel Beckett

365. “But what’s all this about not being able to die, live, be born? That must have some bearing. All this about staying where you are, dying, living, being born, unable to go forwards or back, not knowing where you came from, or where you are, or where you’re going, or that it’s possible to be elsewhere, to be otherwise? Supposing nothing, asking yourself nothing? You can’t, you’re there.”

— Samuel Beckett

366. “God knows I’m not intelligent otherwise I’d be dead.”

— Samuel Beckett

367. “The only thing you must never speak of is your happiness.”

— Samuel Beckett

368. “Oh not that I was ever even incompletely deaf.”

— Samuel Beckett

369. “As long as I kept walking I didn’t hear them, because of the footsteps. But as soon as I halted I heard them again, a little fainter each time, admittedly, but what does it matter, faint or loud, cry is cry, all that matters is that it should cease. For years I thought they would cease. Now I don’t think so any more. I could have done with other loves perhaps. But there it is, either you love or you don’t.”

— Samuel Beckett

370. “And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another.”

— Samuel Beckett

371. “We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties.”

— Samuel Beckett

372. “All hangs together, I am in chains.”

— Samuel Beckett

373. “Charming hour of the day, particularly when, as sometimes happens, it is also that of the setting sun whose last rays, raking the street from end to end, lend to my cenotaph an interminable shadow, astraddle of the gutter and the sidewalk.”

— Samuel Beckett

374. “So there is nothing to be afraid of. And yet I am afraid, afraid of what my words will do to me, to my refuge, yet again. Is there really nothing new to try? I mentioned my hope, but it is not serious. If I could speak and yet say nothing, really nothing?”

— Samuel Beckett

375. “Misfortunes, blessings, I have no time to pick my words, I am in a hurry to be done. And yet no, I am in no hurry.”

— Samuel Beckett

376. “And if I ever stop talking it will be because there is nothing more to be said, even though all has not been said, even though nothing has been said.”

— Samuel Beckett

377. “And I was wondering how to depart without self-loathing or sadness, or with as little as possible, when a kind of immense sigh all around me announced it was not I who was departing, but the flock.”

— Samuel Beckett

378. “It is gone, the heart is gone, the head is gone, no one feels anything, asks anything, seeks anything, says anything, hears anything, there is only silence.”

— Samuel Beckett

379. “I thought much about myself. That is to say I often took a quick look at myself, closed my eyes, forgot, began again.”

— Samuel Beckett

380. “The more people I meet the happier I become.”

— Samuel Beckett

381. “He sometimes halted without saying anything. Either he had finally nothing to say or while having something to say he finally decided not to say it.”

— Samuel Beckett

382. “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. So that I was never disappointed, so to speak, whatever I did, in this domain. And these inseparable fools I indulged turn about, that they might understand their foolishness.”

— Samuel Beckett

383. “There is this to be said for Dachsunds of such length and lowness as Nelly, that it makes very little difference to their appearance whether they stand, sit or lie.”

— Samuel Beckett

384. “And Watt’s need of semantic succour was at times so great that he would set to trying names on things, and on himself, almost as a woman hats.”

— Samuel Beckett

385. “Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything. The horror-worn eyes linger abject on all they have beseeched so long, in a last prayer, the true prayer at last, the one that asks for nothing. And it is then a little breath of fulfilment revives the dead longings and a murmur is born in the silent world, reproaching you affectionately with having despaired too late. The last word in the way of a viaticum.”

— Samuel Beckett

386. “Perhaps I shall be obliged, in order not to peter out, to invent another fairy-tale, yet another, with heads, trunks, arms, legs and all that follows, let loose in the changeless round of imperfect shadow and dubious light.”

— Samuel Beckett

387. “As for my needs, they had dwindled as it were to my dimensions and become, if I may say so, of so exquisite a quality as to exclude all thought of succour.”

— Samuel Beckett

388. “But politeness and candour run together, when one is not fitting neither is the other. Then the occasion calls for silence, that frail partition between the ill-concealed and the ill-revealed, the clumsily false and the unavoidably so.”

— Samuel Beckett

389. “I stopped being half-witted and became sly whenever I took the trouble.”

— Samuel Beckett

390. “And I am perhaps confusing several different occasions, and different times, deep down, and deep down is my dwelling, oh not deepest down, somewhere between the mud and the scum.”

— Samuel Beckett

391. “How is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being save. The four of them were there-or therabouts-and only one speaks of a thief being saved.”

— Samuel Beckett

392. “Here he stood. Here he sat. Here he knelt. Here he lay. Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the window; from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire, from the fire to the bed.”

— Samuel Beckett

393. “There is no great difference, says Proust, between the memory of a dream and the memory of reality.”

— Samuel Beckett

394. “Personally I always preferred Lipton’s.”

— Samuel Beckett

395. “When I penetrate into that house, if I ever do, it will be to go on turning, faster and faster, more and more convulsive, like a constipated dog, or one suffering from worms, overturning furniture, in the midst of my family all trying to embrace me at once, until by virtue of a supreme spasm I am catapulted in the opposite direction and gradually leave backwards, without having said good evening.”

— Samuel Beckett

396. “And if I sometimes hear nothing for hours on end it is for reasons of which I know nothing, or because about me all goes really silent, from time to time, whereas for the righteous the tumult of the world never stops.”

— Samuel Beckett

397. “I was limply poking about in the garbage saying probably, for at that age I must still have been capable of general ideas, This is life.”

— Samuel Beckett

398. “Press and gloom make recognition difficult. Man and wife are strangers two paces apart to mention only this most intimate of all bonds. Let them move on till they are close enough to touch and then without pausing on their way exchange a look. If they recognize each other it does not appear. Whatever it is they are searching for it is not that.”

— Samuel Beckett

399. “You can’t have everything, I’ve often noticed it.”

— Samuel Beckett

400. “But I pushed and pulled in vain, the wheels would not turn. It was as though the brakes were jammed, and heaven knows they were not, for my bicycle had no brakes. And suddenly overcome by a great weariness, in spite of the dying day when I always felt most alive, I threw the bicycle back in the bush and lay down on the ground, on the grass, careless of the dew, I never feared the dew.”

— Samuel Beckett