Samuel Beckett Quotes

... Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria. (There is no greater pain than to remember a happy time when one is in misery.)

No sadness is greater than in misery to rehearse memories of joy.

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.

When my young men began the killing, my heart was hurt.

To touch a sore is to renew one's grief.

The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.

There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery

I know what it's like to lose.

The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.

Each day brought just another minute of the things they could not leave behind. Jane Barrington sitting on the train coming back to Leningrad from Moscow, holding on to her son, knowing she had failed him, crying for Alexander, wanting another drink, and Harold, in his prison cell, crying for Alexander, and Yuri Stepanov on his stomach in the mud in Finland, crying for Alexander, and Dasha in the truck, on the Ladoga ice, crying for Alexander, and Tatiana on her knees in the Finland marsh, screaming for Alexander, and Anthony, alone with his nightmares, crying for his father.

You were unsure which pain is worse -- the shock of what happened or the ache for what never will.

I'm a crumpled up piece of paper lying here, 'Cause I remember it all, all, all... too well...

Of all our sorrows, memory is the worst.

Want is misery.

In the country of pain we are each alone.

Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

I lived and languished.

When the baby dies, On every side Rose stranger's voices, hard and harsh and loud. The baby was not wrapped in any shroud. The mother made no sound. Her head was bowed That men's eyes might not see Her misery.

This tragic brow, these closed eyes, eyebrows raised and knotted.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.

Every day is a new sense of tearing my heart out of my body again when I see other children who have been killed, and I know what their families are going through.

In my experience lust only ever leads to misery. All that suspicion and jealousy and anguish it unleashes. I don't want those things in my life.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.