107 quotes
I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it that nobody ever noticed it?
Malone Dies (1951)
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
Murphy (1938)
Personally of course I regret everything.
Watt (1943)
There is a little of everything, apparently, in nature, and freaks are common.
Molloy (1951)
They never lynch children, babies, no matter what they do they are whitewashed in advance.
The Expelled (1946)
If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.
To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.
Molloy (1951)
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end.
The Unnamable (1954)
What do you expect, one is what one is, partly at least.
Molloy (1951)
To restore silence is the role of objects.
Molloy (1951)
Why can't you write the way people want?
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
Waiting for Godot (1953)
Habit is a compromise effected between an individual and his environment.
I, of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.
The Unnamable (1954)
I find this really most extraordinarily interesting.
Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.
The only sin is the sin of being born.
But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.
Watt (1943)
I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.
The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940 (2009)