Samuel Beckett Quotes - Page 7

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• What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.

  Samuel Beckett

  Love, Names, Evening

  Samuel Beckett (2007). “I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader”, p.170, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what.

  Samuel Beckett

  Mania, Happens, Things Happen

  Samuel Beckett (2012). “The Unnamable”, p.9, Faber & Faber

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• And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.

  Samuel Beckett

  Heart, Thinking, Escaping

  Samuel Beckett (2007). “Molloy”, p.32, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).

  Samuel Beckett

  Eye, Sorrow, Tears

  Samuel Beckett (2012). “Murphy”, p.51, Faber & Faber

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• Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.

  Samuel Beckett

  Death, Air, Dying

  First Love (1973) p. 8

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• The reality of the individualis an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently.

  Samuel Beckett

  Reality, Self

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• Suffering is the main condition of the artistic experience.

  Samuel Beckett

  Suffering, Artistic, Conditions

  Samuel Beckett (1931). “Proust”

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• Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.

  Samuel Beckett

  Humanity, Philosopher, Poet

  Samuel Beckett (2007). “I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader”, p.148, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• How hideous is the semicolon.

  Samuel Beckett

  Hideous

  Samuel Beckett (1959). “Watt”, Grove Pr

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• Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.

  Samuel Beckett

  Smile, Laughter, People

  Samuel Beckett (2012). “Watt”, p.18, Faber & Faber

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• 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

  Mind, Body, Retired

  Samuel Beckett (2011). “Murphy”, p.31, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.

  Samuel Beckett

  Love, Loneliness, Men

  Samuel Beckett, Björnstjerne Björnson, Pearl Stydenstricker Buck, Ivan Alekseevič Bunin (1971). “Samuel Beckett, Björnstjerne Björnson, Pearl Buck [and] Ivan Bunin”

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• The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.

  Samuel Beckett

  Littles, Facts, Ends

  Samuel Beckett (2007). “I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader”, p.256, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• 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.

  Samuel Beckett

  Success, Couple, Home

  Samuel Beckett, Alan Schneider, Maurice Harmon (1998). “No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett & Alan Schneider”, p.492, Harvard University Press

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• I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.

  Samuel Beckett

  Stupid, Book, Writing

  "The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940". Book by Samuel Beckett, 2009.

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• 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.

  Samuel Beckett

  Thinking, Mind, Want

  Samuel Beckett (2007). “Molloy”, p.28, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• It's a lot to ask of one creature, it's a lot to ask, that he should first behave as if he were not, then as if he were, before being admitted to that peace where he neither is, nor is not, and where the language dies that permits of such expressions.

  Samuel Beckett

  Expression, Firsts, Language

  Samuel Beckett (2012). “The Unnamable”, p.43, Faber & Faber

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• The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow.

  Samuel Beckett

  Reality, Appreciate, Effort

  Samuel Beckett, Georges Duthuit (1965). “Proust”

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• Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.

  Samuel Beckett

  Waiting, Why Not, Waiting For Godot

  Samuel Beckett (2007). “I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader”, p.438, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.

  Samuel Beckett

  Morning, Night, Soul

  Samuel Beckett (1995). “The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989”, p.48, Grove Press

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• 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.

  Samuel Beckett

  Happy Birthday, Time, Thinking

  Samuel Beckett (1959). “Watt”, Grove Pr

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• We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

  Samuel Beckett

  People, Saint, Punctuality

  Waiting for Godot (1955) act 2

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• But he had hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the one hand, and the necessity of those others, on the other, (for it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity), when he felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity.)

  Samuel Beckett

  Hands, Feelings, Absurdity

  Samuel Beckett (2012). “Watt”, p.97, Faber & Faber

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• The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering-that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom ... that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils.

  Samuel Beckett

  Real, Two, Evil

  Samuel Beckett (1970). “The collected works of Samuel Beckett”

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• When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.

  Samuel Beckett

  Art, Ignorance, Independent

  Samuel Beckett (1970). “The collected works of Samuel Beckett”

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