Samuel Beckett Quotes

Hamm: Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!

But man is still today, at the age of twenty-five, at the mercy of an erection, physically too, from time to time, it's the common lot, even I was not immune, if that can be called an erection. It did not escape her naturally, women smell a rigid phallus ten miles away and wonder, How on earth did he spot me from there?

He was split, one part of him never left this mental chamber that pictured itself as a sphere full of light fading into dark, because there was no way out. But motion in this world depended on rest in the world outside. A man is in bed, wanting to sleep. A rat is behind the wall at his head, wanting to move. The man hears the rat fidget and cannot sleep, the rat hears the man fidget and dares not move. They are both unhappy, one fidgeting and the other waiting, or both happy, the rat moving and the man sleeping.

it's notorious, ah you can't deny it, some people are lucky, born of a wet dream and dead before morning

The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day.

From the meanest creature one departs wiser, richer, more conscious of one's blessings.

I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of — how shall I say, I don’t know.

Consider: the darkening ease, the brightening trouble; the pleasure pleasure because it was, the pain pain because it shall be; the glad acts grown proud, the proud acts growing stubborn; the panting and trembling towards a being gone, a being to come; and the true true no longer, and the false true not yet. And to decide not to smile after all, sitting in the shade, hearing the cicadas, wishing it were night, wishing it were morning, saying, No, it is not the heart, no, it is not the liver, no, it is not the prostate, no, it is not the ovaries, no, it is muscular, it is nervous.

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

We live on earth and there is no cure

In other words, or perhaps another thing, whatever I said it was never enough and always too much. Yes,

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

There’s man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.

But how much more pleasant was the sensation of being a missile without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion. So pleasant that pleasant was not the word.

All the things you would do gladly, oh without enthusiasm, but gladly, all the things there seems no reason for your not doing, and that you do not do! Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.