Samuel Beckett Quotes - Page 12

The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.

God is love. Yes or no? No.

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.

What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?

There is man in his entirety, blaming his shoe when his foot is guilty.

Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.

My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don't understand how it can be endured.

I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.

What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come

That passed the time. It would have passed in any case. Yes, but not so rapidly.

There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind.

Hardly had the glow been kindled by some good deed on your part or by some little triumph over your rivals or by a word of praisefrom your parents or mentors when it would begin to cool and fade leaving you in a very short time as chill and dim as before.

What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can. But mostly I shall use the various tenses of the past. For mostly I do not know, it is perhaps no longer so, it is too soon to know, I simply do not know, perhaps shall never know.

Try again. Fail again. Try better.

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

All that is active, all that is enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might be described as an abstract, ideal and absolute impermeability.

The essential is to go on squirming forever at the end of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven asporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits.

Adulterers, take warning, never admit.

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.

Estragon: Nothing to be done.

In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg. Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.

What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity. A pity I should have to give tongue at the same time, it prevents it from bleeding in peace, licking the lips.

It's a rare thing not to have been bonny-- once.

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