Samuel Beckett
Full Name: Samuel Barclay Beckett
Birthdate: April 13 or May 13, 1906
Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
Date of Death: December 22, 1989
Occupation: Author, Playwright, and Poet
Profile: Awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature. Best known for
Waiting for Godot.
Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett
Number of Quotes: 42
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.
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Worstward Ho (1983)
Birth was the death of him.
A Piece of Monologue (1979)
Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.
Do we mean love, when we say love?
Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
Habit is a great deadener.
Waiting for Godot (1953)
I can't go on, I'll go on.
The Unnamable (1953)
I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.
I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.
If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.
If you do not love me I shall not be loved. If I do not love you I shall not love.
In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.
It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad,
the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.
James Joyce was a
synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.
Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end
through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.
Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.
Let's go.
We can't.
Why not?
We're waiting for Godot.
Waiting for Godot (1953)
Memories are killing.
First Love (1946)
No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.
Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.
Waiting for Godot (1953)
Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.
Nothing is more real than nothing.
Malone Dies (1951)
Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.
Nothing to be done.
Waiting for Godot (1953)
Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I
wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.
Krapp's Last Tape (1958)
Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.
Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Murphy (1938)
The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
Waiting for Godot (1953)
There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
Waiting for Godot (1953)
To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
We are all born mad. Some remain so.
Waiting for Godot (1953)
We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?
What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.
Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
Words are all we have.
You're on earth, there's no cure for that!
Endgame (1957)
Last on Earth
