Quote

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

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

More quotes by Samuel Beckett

Image
James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.
Samuel Beckett
Image
I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.
Samuel Beckett
Image
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
Image
Let's go. We can't. Why not? We're waiting for Godot.
Samuel Beckett
Image
Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.
Samuel Beckett
Image
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
Image
Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.
Samuel Beckett
Image
Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, words have been my only loves, not many.
Samuel Beckett
Image
If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.
Samuel Beckett
Image
Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.
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
To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.
Samuel Beckett
Image
The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).
Samuel Beckett
Image
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
Image
The only thing you must never speak of is your happiness.
Samuel Beckett
Image
Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.
Samuel Beckett
Image
Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.
Samuel Beckett
Image
Estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.
Samuel Beckett
Image
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
Image
in reality we are one and all from the unthinkable first to the no less unthinkable last glued together in a vast imbrication of flesh without breach or fissure
Samuel Beckett