Daniel McCarthy > Daniel's Quotes

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“We are all born mad. Some remain so.”
― Samuel Beckett

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett

“My mistakes are my life.”
― Samuel Beckett

“I can't go on, I'll go on.”
― Samuel Beckett, I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!”
― Samuel Beckett

“I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”
― Samuel Beckett, Endgame

“Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.”
― Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape & Embers

“Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

Vladimir: Yes, yes, we're magicians.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The only sin is the sin of being born”
― Samuel Beckett

“Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflexion, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come -- ”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.”
― Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

“Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.”
― Samuel Beckett

“ESTRAGON: I can't go on like this.
VLADIMIR: That's what you think.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“there is [...]
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love”
― Samuel Beckett, Cascando and Other Short Dramatic Pieces

“You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness.”
― Samuel Beckett

“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

“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

“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.”
― Samuel Beckett