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It was the only way to progress, to stop.

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
Progress
Stop
Way

More quotes by Samuel Beckett

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We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.
Samuel Beckett
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The short winter’s day was drawing to a close. It seems to me sometimes that these are the only days I have ever known, and especially that most charming moment of all, just before night wipes them out.
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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.
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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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Vladimir: Did I ever leave you? Estragon: You let me go.
Samuel Beckett
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My mistakes are my life.
Samuel Beckett
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Estragon: I can't go on like this. Vladimir: That's what you think.
Samuel Beckett
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Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!
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The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too.
Samuel Beckett
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The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.
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?
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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
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How long have I been here, what a question, I've often wondered. And often I could answer, An hour, a month, a year, a century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being, and there I never went looking for extravagant meanings, there I never much varied, only the here would sometimes seem to vary.
Samuel Beckett
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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.
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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My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record.
Samuel Beckett
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All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.
Samuel Beckett
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Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself, in the end.
Samuel Beckett
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But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.
Samuel Beckett
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What kind of country is this where a woman can't weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!
Samuel Beckett