Top 450 Samuel Beckett Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Samuel Beckett

403. “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

404. “And without knowing exactly what his sin was he felt full well that living was not a sufficient atonement for it or that this atonement was in itself a sin, calling for more atonement, and so on, as if there could be anything but life, for the living.”

— Samuel Beckett

405. “And I shall resemble the wretches famed in fable, crushed beneath the weight of their wish come true. And I even feel a strange desire come over me, the desire to know what I am doing, and why. So I near the goal I set myself in my young days and which prevented me from living. And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another. Very pretty.”

— Samuel Beckett

406. “The ludicrous fever of toys struggling skyward, the sky itself more and more remote, the wind tearing the awning of cloud to tatters, pale limitless blue and green recessions laced with strands of scud, the light failing – once she would have noticed these things.”

— Samuel Beckett

407. “But it is useless to dwell on this period of my life. If I go on long enough calling that my life I’ll end up by believing it.”

— Samuel Beckett

408. “I’m no longer with these assassins, in this bed of terror, but in my distant refuge, my hands twined together, my head bowed, weak, breathless, calm, free, and older than I’ll ever have been, if my calculations are correct. I’ll tell my story in the past none the less, as though it were a myth, or an old fable, for this evening I need another age in which I became what I was.”

— Samuel Beckett

409. “I have finished Pasternak with mixed feelings, which is more than I hoped for.”

— Samuel Beckett

410. “Hell itself, although eternal, dates from the revolt of Lucifer. It is therefore permissible, in the light of this distant analogy, to think of myself as being here for ever, but not as having been here for ever.”

— Samuel Beckett

411. “But there are not two laws, that was the next thing I thought I understood, not two laws, one for the healthy, another for the sick, but one only to which all must bow, rich and poor, young and old, happy and sad. He was eloquent. I pointed out that I was not sad. That was a mistake. Your papers, he said, I knew it a moment later. Not at all, I said, not at all. Your papers! he cried. Ah my papers.”

— Samuel Beckett

412. “Evoke at painful junctures, when discouragement threatens to raise its head, the image of a vast cretinous mouth, red blubber and slobbering, in solitary confinement, extruding indefatigably, with a noise of wet kisses and washing in a tub, the words that obstruct it.”

— Samuel Beckett

413. “Let them be gone now, them and all the others, those I have used and those I have not used, give me back the pains I lent them and vanish, from my life, my memory, my terrors and shames. There, now there is no one here but me, no one wheels about me, no one comes toward me, no one has ever met anyone before my eyes, these creatures have never been, only I and this black void have ever been.”

— Samuel Beckett

414. “For the climber averse to avoidable acrobatics a given niche may lie so many paces or meters to east or west of the woman vanquished without of course his naming her thus or otherwise even in his thoughts.”

— Samuel Beckett

415. “Boys my age with whom, in spite of everything, I was obliged to mix occasionally, mocked me.”

— Samuel Beckett

416. “Nor did he think of Celia any more, though he could sometimes remember having dreamt of her. If only he had been able to think of her, he would not have needed to dream of her.”

— Samuel Beckett

417. “Delicious instants, before one’s eyes get used to the dark.”

— Samuel Beckett

418. “She was willing a little bit of sweated labour, incapable of betraying the slogan of her slavers, that since the customer or sucker was paying for his gutrot ten times what it cost to produce and five times what it cost to fling in his face, it was only reasonable to defer to his complaints up to but not exceeding fifty per cent of his exploitation.”

— Samuel Beckett

419. “The turmoil of the day freezes in a thousand absurd postures.”

— Samuel Beckett

420. “Yes, I know they are words, there was a time I didn’t, as I still don’t know if they are mine.”

— Samuel Beckett

421. “Are you capable of following me? He did not answer. But I seized his thoughts as clearly as if he had spoken them, namely, And you, are you capable of leading me?”

— Samuel Beckett

422. “Say that again” said the red gash in the white putty.”

— Samuel Beckett

423. “They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance. I personally would lynch them with the utmost pleasure, I don’t say I’d lend a hand, no, I am not a violent man, but I’d encourage the others and stand them drinks when it was done.”

— Samuel Beckett

424. “But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think of these things and the other things. It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life, and that I judge it, as it is said that God will judge me, and with no less impertinence. To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don’t torment me, but one sometimes forgets.”

— Samuel Beckett

425. “This version of the facts having been restored, it only remains to say it is no better than the other and no less incompatible with the kind of creature I might just conceivably have been if they had known how to take me. So let us consider now what really occurred.”

— Samuel Beckett

426. “And I’ll be myself at last, as a starveling belches his odourless wind, before the bliss of a coma.”

— Samuel Beckett

427. “But all is forgotten and I have done nothing, unless what I am doing now is something, and nothing could give me greater satisfaction.”

— Samuel Beckett

428. “Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.”

— Samuel Beckett

429. “With his two hands he props up his jaw. He passes without a word. Perhaps he does not see me. One of these days I’ll challenge him. I’ll say, I don’t know, I’ll say something, I’ll think of something when the time comes.”

— Samuel Beckett

430. “There’s my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don’t say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.”

— Samuel Beckett

431. “Did they intrude on me here? No, no one has ever intruded on me here. Elsewhere then.”

— Samuel Beckett

432. “It will be the same silence, the same as ever, murmurous with muted lamentation, panting and exhaling of impossible sorrow, like distant laughter, and brief spells of hush, as of one buried before his time. Long or short, the same silence. Then I resurrect and begin again.”

— Samuel Beckett

433. “So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.”

— Samuel Beckett

434. “Oh, they weren’t notions like yours, they were notions like mine, all spasm, sweat and trembling, without an atom of common sense or lucidity. But they were the best I had.”

— Samuel Beckett

435. “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say, if I had a voice, who says this, saying it’s me? Answer simply, someone answer simply.”

— Samuel Beckett

436. “Fortunately I did not need affection.”

— Samuel Beckett

437. “If I had known who Godot is, I would have written it in the script.”

— Samuel Beckett

438. “The inspection once completed it is usual to put everything carefully back in place as far as possible. It is enjoined by a certain ethics not to do unto others what coming from them might give offence.”

— Samuel Beckett

439. “He will curse God again as in the blessed days face to the open sky the passing deluge. Face to calm eye touch close all calm all white all gone from mind.”

— Samuel Beckett

440. “Whether all grow black, or all grow bright, or all remain grey, it is grey we need, to begin with, because of what it is, and of what it can do, made of bright and black, able to shed the former, or the latter, and be the latter or the former alone. But perhaps I am the prey, on the subject of grey, in the grey, to delusions.”

— Samuel Beckett

441. “Murphy was one of the elect, who require everything to remind them of something else.”

— Samuel Beckett

442. “And I note here the little beat my heart once missed, in my home, when a fly, flying low above my ash-tray, raised a little ash, with the breath of its wings. And I grew gradually weaker and weaker and more and more content.”

— Samuel Beckett

443. “What do you do when you fall far from help?”

— Samuel Beckett

444. “Scratch an old man and find a Quintilian.”

— Samuel Beckett

445. “And at the thought of the punishments Youdi might inflict upon me I was seized by such a mighty fit of laughter that I shook, with mightly silent laughter and my features composed in their wonted sadness and calm. But my whole body shook, and even my legs, so that I had to lean against a tree, or against a bush, when the fit came on me standing, my umbrella being no longer sufficient to keep me from falling. Strange laughter truly, and no doubt misnamed.”

— Samuel Beckett

446. “But is it enough, that’s what tortures me, is it enough?”

— Samuel Beckett

447. “The very look of it made me thirsty.”

— Samuel Beckett

448. “But let us persevere in what we have resolved, before we forget.”

— Samuel Beckett

449. “ESTRAGON: Don’t let’s do anything. It’s safer.”

— Samuel Beckett

450. “Leave them there, sweating and icy, there is better elsewhere. No, life ends and no, there is nothing elsewhere, and no question now of ever finding again that white speck lost in whiteness, to see if they still lie still in the stress of that storm, or of a worse storm, or in the black dark for good, or the great whiteness unchanging, and if not what they are doing.”

— Samuel Beckett