Quote

I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.

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
Words
Rattle
Even
Intended
Kind
Opened
Would
Mouth
Thinking
Mouths
Hear
Knew
Heard
Unintelligible

More quotes by 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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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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Where am I, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
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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Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and going. From the word go.
Samuel Beckett
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We are all born crazy. Some remain that way.
Samuel Beckett
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Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.
Samuel Beckett
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The time-state of attainment eliminates so accurately the time-state of aspiration, that the actual seems the inevitable, and, all conscious intellectual effort to reconstitute the invisible and unthinkable as a reality being fruitless, we are incapable of appreciating our joy by comparing it with our sorrow.
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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My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record.
Samuel Beckett
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I want very much to be back in the caul, on my back in the dark forever.
Samuel Beckett
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I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
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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The fact is, it seems, that the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.
Samuel Beckett
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The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.
Samuel Beckett
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To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
Samuel Beckett
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It is useless not to seek, not to want, for when you cease to seek you start to find, and when you cease to want, then life begins to ram her fish and chips down your gullet until you puke, and then the puke down your gullet until you puke the puke, and then the puked puke until you begin to like it.
Samuel Beckett
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The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).
Samuel Beckett
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Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.
Samuel Beckett
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My mistakes are my life.
Samuel Beckett