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

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
Look
Looks
Silences
Meaning
Listen
Silence
Words

More quotes by Samuel Beckett

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And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.
Samuel Beckett
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How hideous is the semicolon.
Samuel Beckett
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Do they [the publishers of Murphy] not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and thatto compress it further can only make it more obscure?
Samuel Beckett
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The old endless chain of love, tolerance, indifference, aversion and disgust
Samuel Beckett
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Nothing is more real than nothing.
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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The sky sinks in the morning, this fact has been insufficiently observed.
Samuel Beckett
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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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My mistakes are my life.
Samuel Beckett
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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.
Samuel Beckett
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Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.
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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What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.
Samuel Beckett
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It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much. A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.
Samuel Beckett
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What kind of country is this where a woman can't weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!
Samuel Beckett
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in reality we are one and all from the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh without breach or fissure
Samuel Beckett
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What are we doing here, that is the question.
Samuel Beckett
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Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.
Samuel Beckett
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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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Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle.
Samuel Beckett