Samuel Beckett Quotes

Be still my tongue, for i know not what to say; My life is lived in darkness and here i will remain.

There are no explanations, there are no answers.

If my ship sails from sight, it doesn't mean my journey ends, it simply means the river bends.

The swimmer adrift on the open seas measures his strength, and strives with all his muscles to keep himself afloat. But what is he to do when there is no land on the horizon, and none beyond it?

The suicide arrives at the conclusion that what he is seeking does not exist; the seeker concludes that what he has not yet looked in the right place.

There's a lot of times when I feel nihilistic, and lose hope, like I'm just lost in the world. But there's a lot of times when I can kinda be in control of destiny.

You were supposed to have hope, right? You were supposed to respect its power and hold on. And so I did. I held, and held, and let hope fill me. But as the days went on, it seemed I could be holding for a long, long time. Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless

Not everything was lost in the flow of time

I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries, torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet over.

It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.

Behind me there are already so many memories (...) Lots of memories, but no point in remembering them, and ahead of me a long, long road with nothing to aim for ... I just don't want to go along it.

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

I just don't see the light. Where is the light? What am I in this for?

I am in the world feeling my way to light 'amid the encircling gloom.'

We don't understand why we're here, no one's giving us an answer, religion is vague, your parents can't help because they're just people, and it's all terrible, and there's no meaning to anything.

Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.

To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us.

I am a man of lost faiths.

Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn't, there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow, hard, bare and dark space a lot of us spend their lives.

Growing up, I think I always had a sense of art: a sense that there was poetry in the world. I didn't know where I was going to find it. I didn't know where I was going to fit in, that was for sure. But I kept moving forward. There wasn't a future in anything other than movement.

At the end of the day, all you can hope for is to go on. The older I get, the more I realize that just keeping on keeping on is what life's all about.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

Here, everything is tragic through and through, and the will, that fain would shape a world according to its wish, at last can reach no greater satisfaction than the breaking of itself in dignified annulment.

I didn't want to accept that people would forget me, that the government wouldn't do anything to negotiate our freedom. After a year, I came to understand that not only had one year passed, many more would come.

I'd like to say things are bound to get better, but I don't really believe it.