Samuel Beckett Quotes - Page 8

What can it matter to me, that I succeed or fail ? The undertaking is none of mine, if they want me to succeed I'll fail, and vice versa, so as not to be rid of my tormentors.

I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.

Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.

Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place...that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end.

It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.

Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.

Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it for the time needed for it to love it and you it, then throw it away.

You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness.

Where am I, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

Light black. From pole to pole.

But it seems impossible to speak and yet say nothing, you think you have succeeded, but you always overlook something.

I cannot explain my plays. Each must find out for himself what is meant

I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.

There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place.

I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.

I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.

Was I asleep? Had I slept?

I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.

All I say cancels out, I’ll have said nothing.

I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.

It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.

How time flies when one has fun!

For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, words have been my only loves, not many.

Estragon: What about hanging ourselves? Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.