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All the things you would do gladly, oh without enthusiasm, but gladly, all the things there seems no reason for your not doing, and that you do not do! Can it be we are not free? It might be worth looking into.

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
Seems
Reason
Might
Without
Gladly
Things
Enthusiasm
Would
Worth
Looking
Free

More quotes by Samuel Beckett

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Don't look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.
Samuel Beckett
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To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was.
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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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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.
Samuel Beckett
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There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place.
Samuel Beckett
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Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.
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.
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Better hope deferred than none.
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An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.
Samuel Beckett
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That penny farthing hell you call your mind
Samuel Beckett
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I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.
Samuel Beckett
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Estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.
Samuel Beckett
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I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it that nobody ever noticed it?
Samuel Beckett
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There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.
Samuel Beckett
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To find a form that accommodates the shape of the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
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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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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Yes, there is no denying it, any longer, it is not you who are dead, but all the others. So you get up and go to your mother, who thinks she is alive. That's my impression. But now I shall have to get myself out of this ditch. How joyfully I would vanish here, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains.
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How hideous is the semicolon.
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I have always been amazed at my contemporaries’ lack of finesse, I whose soul writhed from morning to night, in the mere quest of itself.
Samuel Beckett