Quote

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

Samuel Beckett

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Without
Stains
Life
Wretched
Mess
Awful
Silence
Gone
Upon
Left
Stain

More quotes by Samuel Beckett

Image
The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too.
Samuel Beckett
Image
How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.
Samuel Beckett
Image
You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other.
Samuel Beckett
Image
The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.
Samuel Beckett
Image
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
Image
To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
Samuel Beckett
Image
What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.
Samuel Beckett
Image
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
Image
James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.
Samuel Beckett
Image
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
Image
But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!
Samuel Beckett
Image
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.
Samuel Beckett
Image
[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.
Samuel Beckett
Image
We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.
Samuel Beckett
Image
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
Image
There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind.
Samuel Beckett
Image
Do we mean love, when we say love?
Samuel Beckett
Image
I gave up before birth.
Samuel Beckett
Image
Yes, light, there is no other word for it.
Samuel Beckett
Image
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