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James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

Samuel Beckett

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Samuel Beckett
Age: 83 †
Born: 1906
Born: April 13
Died: 1989
Died: December 22
Artist
Author
Cricketer
Film Director
French Resistance Fighter
Intellectual
Linguist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Teacher
Dublin city
Samuel Barclay Beckett
Andrew Belis
Sam Beckett
Sa-miao-erh Pei-kʻo-tʻe
Samuel Beḳeṭ
James
Leave
Bring
Trying
Much
Synthesizer
Synthesizers
Joyce

More quotes by Samuel Beckett

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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.
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The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).
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Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.
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I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.
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Don't look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.
Samuel Beckett
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Do we mean love, when we say love?
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Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.
Samuel Beckett
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Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.
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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.
Samuel Beckett
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Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment.
Samuel Beckett
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The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too.
Samuel Beckett
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The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, and more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar, and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon, and stars of the mind, the whole mind.
Samuel Beckett
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No painting is more replete than Mondrian's.
Samuel Beckett
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Mysterious affair, electricity.
Samuel Beckett
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What is this love that more than all the cursed deadly or any other of its great movers so moves the soul and soul what is this soul that more than by any of its great movers is by love so moved?
Samuel Beckett
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I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.
Samuel Beckett
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To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was.
Samuel Beckett
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And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.
Samuel Beckett
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I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.
Samuel Beckett
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Yesterday is not a milestone that has been passed, but a daystone on the beaten track of the years, and irremediably part of us, within us, heavy and dangerous. We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.
Samuel Beckett