Samuel Beckett Quotes - Page 5

What was God doing with himself before the creation?

I try. I fail. I try again. I fail better.

Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.

God is a witness that cannot be sworn.

Words fail, there are times when even they fail.

What is that unforgettable line?

There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.

I gave up before birth.

How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast.

The sky sinks in the morning, this fact has been insufficiently observed.

There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.

The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the edge of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits. I've swallowed three hooks and am still hungry. Hence the howls. What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but strech out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for eternity.

Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. Gently gently. On. Careful.

I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.

The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again.

It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger.

But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.

When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.

Mysterious affair, electricity.

All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante.

I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.

Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher's regular, what normal woman wants affection?

How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?

But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.

To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was.