746 Quotes by Samuel Beckett

That penny farthing hell you call your mind.

My mother. I don’t think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers.

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

I them, the master, myself, we are all innocent, enough. Innocent of what, no one knows, of wanting to know, wanting to be able, of all this noise about nothing, of this long sin against the silence that enfolds us, we wont ask any more, what it covers, this innocence we have fallen to, it covers everything, all faults, all questions, it puts an end to questions.

A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.

Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher’s regular, what normal woman wants affection?

Don’t look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.

I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous, and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. ‘Nothing is more real than nothing.’ They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.

I take no sides. I am interested in the shape of ideas. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine: “Do not despair; one the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.” That sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.