"Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there's nothing like them!"
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Quote collection
Samuel Beckett quotes (page 15 of 16)
319 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"What can it matter to me, that I succeed or fail ? The undertaking is none of mine, if they want me to succeed I'll fail, and vice versa, so as not to be rid of my tormentors."
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"There is this to be said for Dachsunds of such length and lowness as Nelly, that it makes very little difference to their appearance whether they stand, sit or lie."
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"How hideous is the semicolon."
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"My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don't understand how it can be endured."
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"...and a dream away in space with neither her nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away. Nor for in the end again by degrees or as though switched on dark falls there again that certain dark that alone certain ashes can. Through it who knows yet another end beneath a cloudless sky of a last end if ever there had to be another absolutely had to be."
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"The end of a life is always vivifying."
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"I don’t like animals. It’s a strange thing, I don’t like men and I don’t like animals. As for God, he is beginning to disgust me."
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"I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had."
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"I still smile it's not worth the trouble any more for a long time now it's not been worth the trouble the tongue spring goes into the mud I stay like this not thirsty any more the tongue goes back into the mouth it closes it has to make a straight line now it's done I've made the image."
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"It's a rare thing not to have been bonny-- once."
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"All that is active, all that is enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might be described as an abstract, ideal and absolute impermeability."
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"Estragon: Nothing to be done."
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"Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence."
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"Do they [the publishers of Murphy] not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and thatto compress it further can only make it more obscure?"
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"That penny farthing hell you call your mind"
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"Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don't know, I shouldn't have begun."
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"Estragon: Suppose we repented. Vladimir: Repented what? Estragon: Oh...(He reflects.) We wouldn’t have to go into the details. Vladimir: Our being born?"
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"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."
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"My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record."
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