746 Quotes by Samuel Beckett

By all means, nothing simpler. It’s the natural order.

It is gone, the heart is gone, the head is gone, no one feels anything, asks anything, seeks anything, says anything, hears anything, there is only silence.

There is no great difference, says Proust, between the memory of a dream and the memory of reality.

But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think of these things and the other things. It is in the tranquillity of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life, and that I judge it, as it is said that God will judge me, and with no less impertinence. To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don’t torment me, but one sometimes forgets.

He will curse God again as in the blessed days face to the open sky the passing deluge. Face to calm eye touch close all calm all white all gone from mind.

Yes it sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger. Then I see the sky different from what it is and the earth too takes on false colours. It looks like rest, it is not, I vanish happy in that alien light, which must have once been mine, I am willing to believe it, then the anguish of return, I won’t say where, I can’t, to absence perhaps, you must return, that’s all I know, it’s misery to stay, misery to go.

The ludicrous fever of toys struggling skyward, the sky itself more and more remote, the wind tearing the awning of cloud to tatters, pale limitless blue and green recessions laced with strands of scud, the light failing – once she would have noticed these things.

They forget, they think they change and they never change, they’ll be there saying the same thing till they die, then perhaps a little silence, till the next gang arrives on the site.

I have spoken softly, gone my ways softly, all my days, as behoves one who has nothing to say, nowhere to go, and so nothing to gain by being seen or heard.