Quote

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.

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
Rest
Innocuous
Dark
Pollute
Seems
Pits
Littles
Drag
Little
Phrases
Nothing
Rise
Whole
Speech
Real
Seem

More quotes by Samuel Beckett

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But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.
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That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.
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They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
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Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.
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Let's go. We can't. Why not? We're waiting for Godot.
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Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual Poetry is all passionate and feeling and animates the inanimate Metaphysics are most perfect when concerned with universals Poetry, when most concerned with particulars.
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There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind.
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How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.
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Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again.
Samuel Beckett
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If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.
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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
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Nothing is more real than nothing.
Samuel Beckett
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The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps.
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Do we mean love, when we say love?
Samuel Beckett
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I had seen faces in photographs I might have found beautiful had I known even vaguely in what beauty was supposed to consist. And my father's face, on his death-bolster, had seemed to hint at some form of aesthetics relevant to man. But the faces of the living, all grimace and flush, can they be described as objects?
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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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.
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I don’t like animals. It’s a strange thing, I don’t like men and I don’t like animals. As for God, he is beginning to disgust me.
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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I can't go on. I'll go on.
Samuel Beckett