Samuel Beckett

At this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.

What are we doing here, that is the question.

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

This is going to be a happy day. Another happy day.

An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.

The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.

Ah earth you old extinguisher.

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

That penny farthing hell you call your mind

Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.

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?

What we know partakes in no small measure of the nature of what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so that any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail.

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

Sloth is all passions the most powerful.

Do we mean love, when we say love?

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.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Hamm as stated, and Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te, in such a place, and in such a world, that's all I can manage, more than I could.

[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.

Have at last written another [play, i.e., Endgame].... Rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw, more inhuman than "Godot."

Habit is the ballast that chains a dog to his vomit.

I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.

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.

My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark forever.

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

To be together again, after so long, who love the sunny wind, the windy sun, in the sun, in the wind, that is perhaps something, perhaps something.

Birth was the death of him.

I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.

I see ... a multitude ... in transport ... of joy.

Slowly he entered dark and silence and lay there for so long that with what judgement remained he judged them to be final.

His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.

The unthinkable last of all. Unnamable. Last person. I.

What visions in the dark of light!

The screaming silence of no's knife in yes's wound.

All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.

The words too, slow, slow, the subject dies before it comes to the verb, words are stopping too.

With what words shall I name my unnamable words?

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.

Union ... brothers ... Marx ... capital ... bread and butter ... love. It was all Greek to me.

Here form is content, content is form.

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

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.

Those with stomach still to copulate strive in vain.

In the meantime no sense in bickering about pronouns and other parts of blather.

There I sat, in the biting wind, wishing she were gone.

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

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.

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