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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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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
Kill
Virtue
Alone
Pomposity
Sure
Dullness
Men
Vice
Vices
Absolutes
Absolute

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My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.
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You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other.
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The human eyelid is not teartight (happily for the human eye).
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The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, and more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar, and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon, and stars of the mind, the whole mind.
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Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.
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Clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most
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Dying for dark — and the darker the Worse. Strange.
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Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.
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[T]he syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech's daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum cannot vary.
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I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
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The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.
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There's never an end for the sea.
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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.
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Words are all we have.
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Vladimir: I don't understand. Estragon: Use your intelligence, can't you? Vladimir uses his intelligence. Vladimir: (finally) I remain in the dark.
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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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Yes, light, there is no other word for it.
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All that is active, all that is enveloped in time and space, is endowed with what might be described as an abstract, ideal and absolute impermeability.
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We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?
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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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