I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Everything at Amazon by and about: Samuel Beckett

Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
The Unnamable (1959) page 418

Vladimir: That passed the time.
Estragon: It would have passed in any case.
Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly.
Waiting for Godot (1955)

We are all born mad. Some remain so.
Waiting for Godot (1955)

Say what you will, you can't keep a dead mind down.
More Pricks Than Kicks

His plan therefore was not to refuse admission to the idea, but to keep it at bay until his mind was ready to receive it. Then let it in and pulverise it. Obliterate the bastard.
More Pricks Than Kicks

" Humanity is a well with two buckets," said Wylie, " one going down to be filled, the other coming up to be emptied."
Murphy, Chapter 4

" Once a certain degree of insight has been reached," said Wylie, " all men talk, when talk they must, the same tripe."
Murphy, Chapter 4

...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 black and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.
Molloy, Part I

What a rest to speak of bicycles and horns. Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit.
Molloy, Part I
Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.
Molloy, Part I

What I liked in anthropology was its inexhaustible faculty of negation, its relentless definition of man, as though he were no better than God, in terms of what he is not.
Molloy, Part I

Oh the stories I could tell you if I were easy. What a rabble in my head, what a gallery of moribunds. Murphy, Watt, Yerk, Mercier and all the others. I would never have believed that - yes, I believe it willingly. Stories, stories. I have not yet been able to tell them. I shall not be able to tell this one.
Molloy, Part 1I

But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one that offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was condemned to be. Or it was like a kind of clawing towards a light and countenance I could not name, that I had once known and long denied.
Molloy, Part 1I

Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.
Malone Dies

Decidedly the night is long and poor in counsel.
- Malone Dies

I simply believe that I can say nothing that is not true, I mean that has not happened, it's not the same thing but no matter. Yes, that's what I like about me, at least on of the things, that I can say, Up the Republic!, for example, or, Sweetheart!, for example, without having to wonder whether I should not rather have cut my tongue out, or said something else.
Malone Dies

I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.
Malone Dies

Or I might be able to catch one, a little girl for example, and half strangle her, three quarters, until she promises to give me my stick, give me soup, empty my pots, kiss me, fondle me, smile to me, give me my hat, stay with me, follow the hearse weeping into her handkerchief, that would be nice. I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it that nobody ever noticed it?
Malone Dies

...music is the idea itself, unaware of the world of phenomena, existing ideally outside the universe, apprehended not in Space but in Time only, and consequently untouched by the teleological hypothesis.
Proust, 1931

...when it comes to those bastards of journalists, I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind. That's for those bastards of critics.
- Letter to Alan Schneider, 1957

To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.


What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.


How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones.


Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and then look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.


There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.


To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.


The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.


Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.


God: The bastard! He doesn't exist!


Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful.
Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!


We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.


I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.


Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. . . . Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.


Make sense who may. I switch off.


Birth was the death of him.