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
waiting-for-godot godot cruel-fate
All mankind is us, whether we like it or not.
life death dying
Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.
art philosophy history
We could have saved sixpence. We could have saved fivepence. But at what cost?
light shining shadow
But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.
death air dying
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.
love names evening
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.
hands holding-hands pauses
Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede.
loneliness lost-ones body
Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.
waiting motto my-motto
Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.
friendship two sorrow
Two in distressmake sorrow less.
past use deny
What I assert, deny, question, in the present, I still can. But mostly I shall use the various tenses of the past. For mostly I do not know, it is perhaps no longer so, it is too soon to know, I simply do not know, perhaps shall never know.
rain house midnight
Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
memories should-have one-day
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.
love disgrace stoops
To what will love not stoop!