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You would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.

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
Least
Flat
Words
Flats
Blacken
Business
Blank
Obliterate
Better
Holes
Speechless
Looks
Fill
Senseless
Whole
Till
Ghastly
Would
Misery
Texts
Like
Worse
Margins

More quotes by 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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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.
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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.
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I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.
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To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?
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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.
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Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment.
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When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.
Samuel Beckett
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Try again. Fail again. Try better.
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I say me, knowing all the while it's not me.
Samuel Beckett
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We all are born mad. Some remain so.
Samuel Beckett
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Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done.
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It sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger.
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Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.
Samuel Beckett
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We are all born crazy. Some remain that way.
Samuel Beckett
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Adulterers, take warning, never admit.
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The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).
Samuel Beckett
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Deplorable mania, when something happens, to inquire what.
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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.
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Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
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