Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckettwas a French-Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. He is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth13 April 1906
CityFoxrock, Ireland
CountryIreland
thinking thoughtful should-have
it's impossible I should have a mind and I have one
waiting why-not waiting-for-godot
Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.
sin born
The only sin is the sin of being born
birth futility gave-up
I gave up before birth.
love loneliness men
That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.
art reality literature
Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.
morning night soul
I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.
mania happens things-happen
Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what.
solitude proust humans
Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.
inspiring failure trying
Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.
next firsts ends
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.
mean speech ends
The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.
wall nice feet
Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. I can't be punished any more. I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I'll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.
eye simple order
The Unnamable,1954... How all becomes clear and simple when one opens an eye on the within, having of course previously exposed it to the without, in order to benefit by the contrast.