Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Playwright, Novelist

Samuel Beckett was an Irish playwright and novelist known for his influential works exploring absurdity and existentialism, particularly 'Waiting for Godot'.

Thinking Art Waiting For Godot Men Love Time
Born
April 13, 1906
Died
December 22, 1989
Quotes
319
Rank
#127

Quote collection

Samuel Beckett quotes (page 14 of 16)

319 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Samuel Beckett Playwright, Novelist
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"The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the edge of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits. I've swallowed three hooks and am still hungry. Hence the howls. What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but strech out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for eternity."

Long Water Joy
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"The reality of the individualis an incoherent reality and must be expressed incoherently."

Reality Self
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"How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life."

Saving Up Age Said
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"We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals."

Time Hair Age
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"My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art."

Art Ignorance Character
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"There's no lack of void."

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

Artist Mess
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"I have nothing but wastes and wilds of self-translation before me for many miserable months to come."

Self Literature Waste
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"It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much. A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns."

Simple Light Doe
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"in reality we are one and all from the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh without breach or fissure"

Reality Together Flesh
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"It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution."

Suicide Home Lingering
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"Dying for dark — and the darker the Worse. Strange."

Dark Dying Strange
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"Light black. From pole to pole."

Light Black
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"You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness."

Fall Night Darkness
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"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."

Love Loneliness Despair
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"Was I asleep? Had I slept?"

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"Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you."

Misery Enough Pauses
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"I cannot explain my plays. Each must find out for himself what is meant"

Play
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