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Samuel Beckett Quotes

Browse 16 quotes about Samuel Beckett.

Samuel Beckett Quotes

“HAMM: In my house. (pause.) One day you’ll be blind, like me. You’ll be sitting there, a speck in the void, in the dark, for ever, like me. (pause.) One day you’ll say to yourself, I’m tired, I’ll sit down, and you’ll go and sit down. Then you’ll say, I’m hungry, I’ll get up and get something to eat. But you won’t get up. You’ll say, I shouldn’t have sat down, but since I have I’ll sit on a little longer, then I’ll get up and get something to eat. But you won’t get up and you won’t get anything to eat. (pause.) You’ll look at the wall a while, then you’ll say, I’ll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I’ll feel better, and you’ll close them. And when you open them again there’ll be no wall any more. (pause.) Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t fill it, and there you’ll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe. (pause.) Yes, one day you’ll know what it is, you’ll be like me, except that you won’t have anyone with you, because you won’t have had pity on anyone and because there won’t be anyone left to have pity on. (pause.)”

EndgameSamuel Beckett
Book:Endgame
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“You lean back against the door with bowed head making ready to set out. By the time you open your eyes your feet have disappeared and the skirt of your great coat come to rest on the surface of the snow. The dark scene seems lit from below. You see yourself at the last outset leaning against the door with closed eyes waiting for the word from you to go. To be gone.Then the snowlit scene. You lie in the dark with closed eyes and see yourself there as described making ready to strike out and away across the expanse of light. You hear again the click of the door pulled gently to and the silence before the steps can start. Next thing you are on your way across the white pasture afrolic with lambs in spring and strewn with red placantae.”

BeckettSamuel Beckett
Book:Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho
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“Estragon:-¿Cuál es nuestro papel en este asunto? Vladimir:-¿Nuestro papel? Estragon:-Tómate tiempo. Vladimir:-¿Nuestro papel? El del suplicante. Estragon:-¿Hasta este extremo? Vladimir: ¿El señor tiene exigencias que hacer valer? Estragon:-¿Ya no tenemos derechos? (Risa de Vladimir, quien se reprime como antes. Mismos gestos, salvo la sonrisa) Vladimir:-Me harías reír si me estuviera permitido. Estragon:-¿Los hemos perdido? Vladimir (con claridad):-Los hemos vendido.”

BeckettTeatroDerechosSamuel Beckett
Book:Waiting for Godot
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“…[Samuel Beckett’s] diaries contained so little overt condemnation of the Nazis, although no one who has read them could be in any doubt about how much Beckett - who was to join the French Resistance in the war – loathed the regime. …[But] Beckett was quick to pick up on the absurd, such as the story he heard involving a servant and a milkman. In order to prevent Rassenschande [racial impurity], no Aryan servant under forty-five was allowed to work in a Jewish household. When a puzzled milkman asked a Herr Levi’s Gentile housekeeper how come she worked for him she replied that she was partly Jewish. When subsequently her even more perplexed employer asked her why she had lied to the milkman, she replied that she could not possibly admit to being forty-five.”

NazismAnti SemitismNazisThird ReichSamuel BeckettAdolph HitlerRassenschande
Book:Travellers in the Third Reich
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“And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think…Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named. All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To hell with it anyway.”

Samuel BeckettMolloy
Book:Molloy
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“Watt'ın başka bir koğuşa verilmesinden sonra yeniden karşılaşmamıza kadar belli bir süre geçti. Her zamanki gibi, yani sevdiğim havanın çağrısına uyduğum zamanlardaki gibi bahçemde dolaşıyordum. Watt da benzer biçimde kendi bahçesinde dolaşıyordu. Ama artık aynı bahçe söz konusu olmadığı için karşılaşamıyorduk. Bu yeni karşılaşma, sonunda ileride betimleneceği gibi gerçekleştiğinde, her ikimiz de; Watt da ben de bunu arzulasak, çok daha önce karşılaşabileceğimizi anladık. Ama işte bizde eksik olan karşılaşma arzusuydu. Watt benimle karşılaşmak istemiyordu, ben de Watt ile karşılaşmak istemiyordum. Gerçekten de birbirimizle bir araya gelmek, yeniden dolaşmak ve laflamak düşüncesi düşmanca gelmiyordu bize, hayır, ilgisi yok, yalnızca Watt da ben de buna istekli değildik.”

Samuel BeckettIstekWattKarşılaşma
Book:Watt
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