Samuel Beckett Quotes

There is no escape from yesterday because yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us. The mood is of no importance. Deformation has taken place.

Bones mend. Regret stays with you forever.

I read a lot of articles about young women in the resistance. All of a sudden, I felt that if I go too much into this horror, then I won't be able to start as a fresh character.

In a healthy individual, a broken bone that has healed properly is strongest where it was once broken. You have not lost any life, Henry told himself. You will still get your fair share of years. Yet the quality of his life changed. Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal.

The hurt affects your ability to go forward.

Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who've been in love with the wrong man too often.

There’s no way you can kill someone and get to the other side of the experience unchanged.

I was badly bullied when I was in the seventh grade - relentlessly, mercilessly - by a group of 12-year-old girls. And it left me with a determination that no matter what, I had to throw my shoulders back, stick out my chin, and project a sense that no one and nothing could hurt me. That turned out to be a life-changing mistake.

The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people's lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.

I think that humans have a huge capacity to carry pain and sadness. There are things that haunt us our entire lives; we are unable to let them go. The good times seem almost effervescent and dreamlike in comparison with the times that didn't go so well.

My lifestyle is a consequence of my wounds. I'm the son of my history.

Countries and individuals do not change unless they undergo a trauma.

Every person is a book, each year a chapter.

Things happen in my physical body, in my relationships. I've buried three fathers and a mother. I've had a doctor tell me I've got a tumor in my brain. And when you face those situations, they transform you, they change you, and when you're able to break through them to a new level, they allow you to have gifts to give other people.

Sometimes it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives. It's as if you are carrying the suffering of the people you have photographed.

If all the people who have been hurt by the war were to exclude joy from their lives, it would almost be as if they had died.

Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

It had taken years to put themselves back together, and so what if some things didn’t get put back in the right place? At least they could hold themselves up.

I am professional. Hardworking. Committed. Loyal. Also sentimental. But I had changed a little over the years. There was a bit of a heaviness to my soul because of the intensity of my job.

You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. ... But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you [that is, passed through you]. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad.

Losing my mother at such an early age is the scar of my soul. But I feel like it ultimately made me into the person I am today; I understand the journey of life. I had to go through what I did to be here.

When you can't bear something but it goes on anyway, the person who survives isn't you anymore; you've changed and become someone else, a new person, the one who did bear it after all.

You just can't win. Men have very recent land mines in their heads. Women have recorded conversations and photographs in their heads from 15 years ago.

I grew up in a refugee camp in Uganda, and I lived there for 30 years. That shapes one's character.