Samuel Beckett Quotes

I love language, and I love the failure of language.

Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person's silence.

Bruno, my old faithful. I haven't sufficiently described him. Is it enough to say he is indescribable? No. Better to try and fail than not to try at all.

It is at this point that normal language gives up, and goes and has a drink.

I hardly ever talk- words seem such a waste, and they are none of them true. No one has yet invented a language from my point of view.

I had always suspected language was quite limited in its ability to communicate the intricate mysteries of truth.

No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

I'm interested in when language fails, when it is opaque.

I'm not very good with words, weirdly.

Coming from a very inarticulate family made me try to speak for those who can't express themselves and created a need for articulation at its most ceremonial - poetry.

Suddenly, I don't know what to say. It happens often to me. I know what I want to say, I think about whether it is what I mean, but when the moment comes to speak, I can't say it. - Nana Kleinfrankenheim, Vivre Sa Vie.

At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.

As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.

I have drawn from the well of language many a thought which I do not have and which I could not put into words.

It was as if he had come to mistrust words somehow. Words, and the sentiments words carried.

When I undertake to tell the best, I find I cannot. My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots, My breath will not be obedient to its organs, I become a dumb man.

... the truth is exactly that which can't be got into words. We are forced to lie, a little or, if we are inferior, much.

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.

There were grammatical errors even in his silence.

Silence is terrible and painful only to those who have said all and have nothing more to speak of; but to those who never had anything to say— to them silence is simple and easy.

Words are difficult and photography takes the words away from things. It's difficult to talk about something that seems to come very naturally to you, to explain a process. A moment is really difficult to put on paper.

A language is a map of our failures

That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.