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
life death birth
The end of a life is always vivifying.
life daughter horse
[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.
god water long
The essential is to go on squirming forever at the end of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven asporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits.
loss thinking sight
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.
men vices virtue
Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.
cycling nasty ill
The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.
art philosophy dust
The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again.
breathing greedy given
Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.
mean laughing endgame
HAMM: We're not beginning to... to... mean something? CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!
long water forever
The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the edge of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits. I've swallowed three hooks and am still hungry. Hence the howls. What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but strech out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for eternity.
mind pennies hell
That penny farthing hell you call your mind
moving past hands
I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side. (Pause. Krapp's lips move. No sound.) Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.
saving-up age said
How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.
art philosophy history
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.