Quotes from Samuel Beckett

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.

We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.

To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.

That double-headed monster of damnation and salvation--Time.

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

I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.

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

Words are all we have.

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.

We are all born crazy. Some remain that way.

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

To know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.

There is something...more important in life than punctuality, and that is decorum.

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.

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.

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. (He laughs.) Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. (Pause.) Let us not speak well of it either. (Pause.) Let us not speak of it at all.

I felt ill at ease with all this air about me, lost before the confusion of innumerable prospects.

No way in, go in, measure.

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.

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

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.

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.

We're not beginning...to...to...mean something? Mean something? You and I mean something?

When I fall I'll weep for happiness.