Samuel Beckett

"Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of."

"This place, if I could describe this place, no place around me, there’s no end to me, I don’t know what it is, it isn’t flesh, it doesn’t end, it’s like air…"

"Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, 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."

"Tears, that could be the tone, if they weren't so easy, the true tone and tenor at last."

"My keepers, why keepers, I'm in no danger of stirring an inch, ah I see, it's to make me think I'm a prisoner, frantic with corporeality, rearing to get out and away."

"Here's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough."

"Hamm: Can there be misery (he yawns) loftier than mine?"

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

"Hamm: If I could sleep I might make love. I'd go into the woods. My eyes would see … the sky, the earth. I'd run, run, they wouldn't catch me."

"Hamm: There's something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head."

"Clov: When I fall I'll weep for happiness."

"Nell: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness. Nagg: Oh? Nell: Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more."

"Hamm: Look at the ocean! (Clov gets down, takes a few steps towards window left, goes back for ladder, carries it over and sets it down under window left, gets up on it, turns the telescope on the without, looks at length. He starts, lowers the telescope, examines it, turns it again on the without.) Clov: Never seen anything like that! Hamm (anxious): What? A sail? A fin? Smoke? Clov (looking): The light is sunk. Hamm (relieved): Pah! We all knew that. Clov (looking): There was a bit left. Hamm: The base. Clov (looking): Yes. Hamm: And now? Clov (looking): All gone. Hamm: No gulls? Clov (looking): Gulls! Hamm: And the horizon? Nothing on the horizon? Clov (lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, exasperated): What in God's name could there be on the horizon? (Pause.) Hamm: The waves, how are the waves? Clov: The waves? (He turns the telescope on the waves.) Lead. Hamm: And the sun? Clov (looking): Zero. Hamm: But it should be sinking. Look again. Clov (looking): Damn the sun. Hamm: Is it night already then? Clov (looking): No. Hamm: Then what is it? Clov (looking): Gray. (Lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, louder.) Gray! (Pause. Still louder.) GRRAY! (Pause. He gets down, approaches Hamm from behind, whispers in his ear.) Hamm (starting): Gray! Did I hear you say gray? Clov: Light black. From pole to pole."

"Hamm: What's he doing? (CLOV raises lid of NAGG's bin, stoops, looks into it. Pause.) Clov: He's crying. (He closes lid, straightens up) Hamm: Then he's living."

"Hamm: We're not beginning … to … to … mean something? Clov: Mean something? You and I mean something?"

"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."

"Krapp: Ah finish your booze now and get to your bed. Go on with this drivel in the morning. Or leave it at that. (Pause.) Leave it at that."

"No way in, go in, measure."

"No, life ends and no, there is nothing elsewhere, and no question now of ever finding again that white speck lost in whiteness, to see if they still lie still in the stress of that storm, or of a worse storm, or in the black dark for good, or the great whiteness unchanging, and if not what they are doing."

"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

"Enough. Sudden enough. Sudden all far. No move and sudden all far. All least. Three pins. One pinhole. In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on."

"Birth was the death of him."

"Why can't you write the way people want?"

"Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing."

"I saw three short Beckett plays when I was sixteen, and I didn't know what it was but It hit me like a train. It was intense enough for me to never forget it. My road to Damascus."

"I remember two playwrights who affected me deeply, for their wit especially: Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett. I found their sense of absurdity comforting."

"In regard to absurdism, Samuel Beckett is sometimes considered to be the epitome of the postmodern artist … In fact, he is the aesthetic reductio ad absurdum of absurdism: no longer whistling in the dark, after waiting for Godot, he is trying to be radically silent, wordless in the dark. Beckett tries to bespeak a failure of the logos that never quite succeeds in being a failure, for to speak the failure would be a kind of success. Hence the essentially comic (hence unavoidably and ultimately affirmative) nature of his work."

"[F]or Beckett, immobility, death, the loss of personal movement and of vertical stature...are only a subjective finality...only a means in relation to more profound end. It is a question of attaining once more the world before man...the position where movement was...under the regime of universal variation, and where light, always propagating itself, had no need to be revealed..."

"Though Godot contains all the wit and whimsicality of Murphy (minus a great deal of the old pedantry), it has one new ingredient — humanity. The novel and the play both tell us that human suffering is comic and irrational (" absurd" in the fashionable jargon), but only Godot reads like the work of a man who has actually suffered. …Even if it added nothing to Murphy, Godot would still be remarkable by the mere fact of being a popular play on an unpopular theme. It popularity is a smack in the face for all those who say that to be a skillful playwright one must first be a "man of the theatre." As far as I know, Mr Beckett may never have been backstage in his life until Godot was first performed. Yet, this first play shows consummate stagecraft. Its author has achieved a theoretical impossibility — a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What’s more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice. . . . Godot makes fun even of despair. No further proof of Mr Beckett’s essential Irishness is needed. He outdoes MM Sartre and Camus in skepticism, just as Swift beat Voltaire at his own game. . . . About the only thing Godot shows consistent respect for is the music-hall low-comedy tradition."

"Krapp: 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."

"Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning."

"The only sin is the sin of being born."

"If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot."

"„Immer versucht. Immer gescheitert. Egal. Wieder versuchen. Wieder scheitern. Besser scheitern.“"

"Wir werden alle verrückt geboren. Einige bleiben es."

"Die Sonne schien, da sie keine Wahl hatte, auf nichts Neues."