Samuel Beckett Quotes - Page 10

To find a form that accommodates the shape of the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

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.

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

Love requited is a short circuit.

Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. I can't be punished any more. I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I'll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.

My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that? Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms.

To what will love not stoop!

Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.

I say me, knowing all the while it's not me.

That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.

Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain amount of both. They being one.

And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.

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.

In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.

Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: Yes, yes, we're magicians.

No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.

It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much. A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.

Dying for dark — and the darker the Worse. Strange.

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

I still smile it's not worth the trouble any more for a long time now it's not been worth the trouble the tongue spring goes into the mud I stay like this not thirsty any more the tongue goes back into the mouth it closes it has to make a straight line now it's done I've made the image.

Women are all the bloody sameyou can't love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery.

in reality we are one and all from the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh without breach or fissure

Enough to know no knowing.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.