Samuel Beckett Quotes

Having oscillated all his life between the torments of a superficial loitering and the horrors of disinterested endeavour, he finds himself at last in a situation where to do nothing exclusively would be an act of the highest value, and significance.

God damn you to hell, Sir, no, it's indecent, there are limits! In six days, do you hear me, six days, God made the world. Yes Sir, no less Sir, the WORLD! And you are not bloody well capable of making me a pair of trousers in three months!'
'But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look at the world and look at my TROUSERS!

I happened to look up and there it was. All over and done with, at last. I sat on for a few moments with the ball in my hand and the dog yelping and pawing at me. (Pause.) Moments. Her moments, my moments (Pause.) The dog's moments.

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

In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe.

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

Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits.

Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.

Now I was making my way through the garden. There was that strange light which follows a day of persistent rain, when the sun comes out and the sky clears too late to be of any use. 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 possible. Fuck off, she said.

CLOV:
Do you believe in the life to come?
HAMM:
Mine was always that.

But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.

Use your head, can't you, use your head, you're on earth, there's no cure for that!

On turning to the Work in Progress we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression — pages and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfil no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension. . . Mr. Joyce has a word to say to you on the subject: “Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as harmful; etc.” And another: “Who in his hearts doubts either that the facts of feminine clothiering are there all the time or that the feminine fiction, stranger than facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere? Or that one may be separated from the orther? Or that both may be contemplated simultaneously? Or that each may be taken up in turn and considered apart from the other?”

Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read — or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.

WINNIE: Sometimes I am wrong. (Smile.) But not often. (Smile off.) Sometimes all is over, for the day, all done, all said, all ready for the night, and the day not over, far from over, the night not ready, far, far from ready. (Smile.) But not often. (Smile off.)

Clov: If I don't kill the rat, he'll die.
Hamm: That's right.