“An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.”
Source: Disjecta: miscellaneous writings and a dramatic fragment
“Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.”
Source: Disjecta: miscellaneous writings and a dramatic fragment
“The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, and more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar, and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon, and stars of the mind, the whole mind.”
“When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.”
Source: The collected works of Samuel Beckett
“No painting is more replete than Mondrian's.”
Source: Disjecta: miscellaneous writings and a dramatic fragment
“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.”
Source: Disjecta: miscellaneous writings and a dramatic fragment
“Women are all the bloody sameyou can't love for five minutes without wanting it abolished in brats and house bloody wifery.”
“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.”
Source: Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
“Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.”
Source: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989
“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.”
Source: Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still
“I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come.”
Source: No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett & Alan Schneider
“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.”
Source: No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett & Alan Schneider
“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.”
Source: I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader
“Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.”
Source: The collected works of Samuel Beckett
“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.”
Source: The collected works of Samuel Beckett
“Watt's concern, deep as it appeared, was not after all what the figure was, in reality, but with what the figure appeared to be, in reality.”
“Lick your neighbor as yourself!”
Source: Endgame, a Play in One Act: Followed by Act Without Words, a Mime for One Player
“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?”
Source: All That Fall and Other Plays for Radio and Screen
“Love requited is a short circuit.”
“To what will love not stoop!”
Source: The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett: All That Fall, Act Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Cascando, Eh Joe, Footfall, Rockaby and others
“God is love. Yes or no? No.”
Source: Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still
“What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.”
Source: I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader
“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?”
Source: All That Fall and Other Plays for Radio and Screen
“Imagination at wit's end spreads its sad wings.”
Source: Company / Ill Seen Ill Said / Worstward Ho / Stirrings Still
“Adulterers, take warning, never admit.”
Source: The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett: All That Fall, Act Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Cascando, Eh Joe, Footfall, Rockaby and others
“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.”
Source: Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
“That double-headed monster of damnation and salvation--Time.”
Source: I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader
“Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain amount of both. They being one.”
Source: The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett: All That Fall, Act Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Cascando, Eh Joe, Footfall, Rockaby and others
“Against the charitable gesture there is no defence.”
Source: Molloy
“It was the only way to progress, to stop.”
Source: I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader
“I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.”
Source: The Unnamable
“The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).”
Source: Murphy
“The sky sinks in the morning, this fact has been insufficiently observed.”
Source: Molloy
“I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark forever.”
Source: More Pricks Than Kicks
“I gave up before birth.”
Source: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989
“Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.”
Source: Watt
“Sloth is all passions the most powerful.”
“Humbly to ask a favour of people who are on the point of knocking your brains out sometimes produces good results.”
Source: Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
“Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment.”
“All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante.”
“I speak for an art ... weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.”
“The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering-that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom ... that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils.”
Source: The collected works of Samuel Beckett
“If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the "Naught is more real ..." and the "Ubi nihil vales ..." both already in Murphy and neither very rational.”
Source: Disjecta: miscellaneous writings and a dramatic fragment
“As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places.”
Source: Murphy
“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.”
Source: Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
“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.”
Source: Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
“I try. I fail. I try again. I fail better.”
“The day you die is just like any other, only shorter.”
“I had little talent for happiness.”
Source: I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader
“Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right mind. Then it passes off and I'm as intelligent as ever.”
Source: The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett
