Samuel Beckett quotes:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.

It is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it.

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.

I can't go on. I'll go on.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.

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.

No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.

If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.

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

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.

What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening.

Unfathomable mind: now beacon, now sea.

What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.

I can't go on, I'll go on.

Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others. So you get up and go to your mother, who thinks she is alive. That's my impression. But now I shall have to get myself out of this ditch. How joyfully I would vanish here, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains.

How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones?

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

As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places.

Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.

It's so nice to know where you're going, in the early stages. It almost rids you of the wish to go there.

Birth was the death of him.

The more people I meet the happier I become.

Hell must be like... reminiscing about the good old days when we wished we were dead.

And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation ... Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant."

We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

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

We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. Come, let's get to work! (He advances towards the heap, stops in his stride.) In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone more, in the midst of nothingness!

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.

What kind of country is this where a woman can't weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!

Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle.

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

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.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.

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?

Let us do something, while we have the chance! ... Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!

The loss of my sight was a great fillip. If I could go deaf and dumb I think I might pant on to be a hundred.

I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.

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

The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.

Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.

It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger.

And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.

In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.

To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.

How time flies when one has fun!

Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.

I asked her to look at me and after a few moments - (pause) - after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low) Let me in.

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

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

What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come

Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.

I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was supposed to consist. And my father's face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?

And what I have, what I am, is enough, was always enough for me, and as far as my dear little sweet little future is concerned I have no qualms, I have a good time coming.

For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.

It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.

Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.

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.

James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.

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.

I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.

That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.

When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.

All life long, the same questions, the same answers.

She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.

Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what.

Do we mean love, when we say love?

If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the "Naught is more real ..." and the "Ubi nihil vales ..." both already in Murphy and neither very rational.

My mistakes are my life.

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand.

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.

Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.

All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.

We spend our life, it's ours, trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench

The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.

Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.

God damn you to hell, Sir, no, it's indecent, there are limits! In six days, do you hear me, six days, God made the world. Yes Sir, no less Sir, the WORLD! And you are not bloody well capable of making me a pair of trousers in three months!''But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look at the world and look at my TROUSERS!

I don't think I recognize you, sir, said Camier.I am Watt, said Watt. As you say, I'm unrecognizable.Watt? said Camier. The name means nothing to me.I am not widely know, said Watt, true, but I shall be, one day. Not universally, perhaps, my notoriety is not likely ever to penetrate to the denizens of Dublin's fair city, or of Cuq-Toulza.

What is that unforgettable line?

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

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

CLOV:Do you believe in the life to come?HAMM:Mine was always that.

HAMM:Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?NAGG:I didn't know.HAMM:What? What didn't you know?NAGG:That it'd be you.(Pause.)

I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.

POZZO:I am blind.(Silence.)ESTRAGON:Perhaps he can see into the future.

The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness around me I feel less alone. (Pause.) In a way. (Pause.) I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to... (hesitates) ...me. (Pause.)

Curiosity is the hair of our habit tending to stand on end. It rarely happens that our attention is not stained in greater or lesser degree by this animal element.

Was I asleep? Had I slept?

Dying for dark - the darker the worse. Strange.

they comedifferent and the samewith each it is different and the samewith each the absence of love is differentwith each the absence of love is the same

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

Spend the years of learning squanderingCourage for the years of wanderingThrough a world politely turningFrom the loutishness of learning.

In order to be company he must display a certain mental activity. But it need not be of a high order. Indeed it might be argued the lower the better. Up to a point. The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point.

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps.We have time to grow old.The air is full of our cries.But habit is a great deadener.At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing.Let him sleep on.

The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.

I speak for an art ... weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.

Love requited is a short circuit.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm in my right mind. Then it passes off and I'm as intelligent as ever.

Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.

My life, my life, now I speak of it as of something over, now as of a joke which still goes on, and it is neither, for at the same time it is over and it goes on, and is there any tense for that? Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms.

The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow.

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

If you don't know where you are currently standing, you're dead.

Vladimir: Did I ever leave you? Estragon: You let me go.

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.

If you do not love me I shall not be loved If I do not love you I shall not love.

You're on earth. There's no cure for that.

...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.

...you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, 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

[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.