Samuel Beckett Quotes

HAMM:Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?NAGG:I didn't know.HAMM:What? What didn't you know?NAGG:That it'd be you.(Pause.)

The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness around me I feel less alone. (Pause.) In a way. (Pause.) I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to... (hesita...

About Author

Samuel Barclay Beckett ( ; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic episodes of life, often coupled with black comedy and literary nonsense. A major figure of Irish literature, he is best remembered for his 1953 play Waiting for Godot, and he is considered to be one of the last modernist writers, as well as a key figure in what Martin Esslin called, the "Theatre of the Absurd." Beckett received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation."
A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. His later works became increasingly minimalistic as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness repetition and self-reference. During the Second World War, Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria) and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1949.
Beckett's works are known for their existential themes, and these made them an important part of 20th-century plays and dramas. In 1961, he shared the inaugural Prix International with Jorge Luis Borges. He was the first person to be elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.

The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was...

Gimdyti apsižergus kapą ir kančiose gimti. Duobėje duobkasys svajingai tvarkosi įrankius. Lieka laiko susenti. Ore skamba mūsų riksmai.

1por qué no simplemente no esperara ser ocasión deun vertedero de palabras¿no es mejor abortar que ser estéril?después de tu partida las horas son tan tristessiempre empiezan a rastras demasiado pront...

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.

And I was wondering how to depart without self-loathing or sadness, or with as little as possible, when a kind of immense sigh all around me announced it was not I who was departing, but the flock.

ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?VLADIMIR: (impatiently). Yes, yes, we’re magicians. But let us persevere in what we have resolved, before we forget.

Estragon: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'...

What mattered to me in my dispeopled kingdom, that in regard to which the disposition of my carcass was the merest and most futile of accidents, was supineness in the mind, the dulling of the self and...

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

Neyse ki gözkapaklarını kapamak söz konusu değil burada, yummak gereken ruh aslında, şu boşuna yadsınmaya çalışılan uyanık, kaygılı ruh; limansız, gemisiz, tözsüz, tinsiz gecede bir fenerin içindeymiş...

A cheval sur une tombe et une naissance difficile. Du fond du trou, rêveusement, le fossoyeur applique ses fers. On a le temps de vieillir. L'air est plein de nos cris.

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? Watc...

Bütün bu şeyler, bazı şeylerin hiçbir anlam taşımamayı sürdürdükleri gibi hiçbir anlam taşımasalar yani sonuna dek anlamsızlıkta direnseler, asla söz edilemezdi bunlardan. Çünkü hiçten söz etmenin tek...

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

VLADIMIR: Dance, hog!

From Beckett's The Unnamable:They love each other, marry, in order to love each other better, more conveniently, he goes off to the wars, he dies at the wars, she weeps, with emotion, at having loved...

From time to time. You do not count your steps any more. For the simple reason they number each day the same. Average day in day out the same. The way being always the same. You keep count of the days...

To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.