Information and Guide to Anglo-Irish writer Samuel Beckett created and maintained in Dublin, Ireland

Victor on his bed. Motionless. The audience do not necessarily see him at first. He becomes restless, sits on the bed, stands up, paces up and down in his socks in all directions, from the window to the footlights, from the door to the invisible barrier between him and the main action, slowly and vaguely, keeps stopping, looks out of the window, looks at the audience, goes back and sits on the bed, lies down again, becomes motionless, stands up, starts pacing again, etc But most of the time he stays where he is, either motionless or restless. His movements, although vague, nevertheless follow a fixed rhythm and pattern, s o that the audience finally become more or less aware of where he is without having to look at him.
- Eleutheria

Vladimir: It would pass the time. (Estragon hesitates) I assure you, it'd be an occupation.
Estragon: A relaxation.
Vladimir: A recreation.
- Waiting for Godot

The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.
- Three Dialogues

Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.
- Molloy

Over, over, there is a soft place in my heart for all that is over, no, for the being over, words have been my only loves, not many
- First Love

The sky sinks in the morning, this fact has been insufficiently observed
- Molloy

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me
- From an Abandoned Work

The within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and the heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath.
- Molloy

Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it for the time needed for it to love it and you it, then throw it away
- Molloy

And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think. And so on for all the other things which made merry with my senses. Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named.
- Molloy

What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland, such is my considered opinion, this evening
- First Love

No memories of felicity save with faint ruffle of sorrow
- All Strange Away

At bounds of boundless void.
- Worstward Ho

For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.
- Molloy

Enough to know no knowing.
- Worstward Ho

Gain time to lose.
- Worstward Ho

Well, I suppose it is the Protestant thing to do.
- All That Fall

I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence. - Malone

There is no use in indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.
- Malone

My notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record.
- Malone

The end of a life is always vivifying.
- Malone

Against the charitable gesture there is no defence.
- Molloy

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that.... Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.
- Endgame

You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
- The Unnamable

Watt's need of semantic succour was at times so great that he would set to trying names on things, and on himself, almost as a woman hats.
- Watt

Say what you will, you can.t keep a dead mind down.
- More Pricks Than Kicks

His plan therefore was not to refuse admission to the idea, but to keep it at bay until his mind was ready to receive it. Then let it in and pulverise it. Obliterate the bastard.
- More Pricks Than Kicks

God is a witness that cannot be sworn.
- Watt

Bun is such a sad word, is it not?
- Watt

As there seemed no measure between what Watt could understand, and what he could not, so there seemed none between what he deemed certain, and what he deemed doubtful.
- Watt

But our particular friends were the rats, that dwelt by the stream. They were long and black. We brought them such tidbits from our ordinary as rinds of cheese, and morsels of gristle, and we brought them also birds. eggs, and frogs, and fledgelings. Sensible of these attentions, they would come flocking round us at our approach, with every sign of confidence and affection, and glide up our trouserlegs, and hang upon our breasts. And then we would sit down in the midst of them, and give them to eat, out of our hands, of a nice fat frog, or a baby thrush. Or seizing suddenly a plump young rat, resting in our bosom after its repast, we would feed it to its mother, or its father, or its brother, or its sister, or to some less fortunate relative. It was on these occasions, we agreed, after an exchange of views, that we came nearest to God.
- Watt

How hideous is the semi-colon.
- Watt

To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.
- Watt

The sun shone having no alternative on the nothing new.
- Murphy

Murphy.s purpose in going to sit at Neary.s feet was not to develop the Neary heart, which he thought would quickly prove fatal to a man of his temper, but simply to invest his own with a little of what Neary, at the time a Pythagorean, called the Apmonia. For Murphy had such an irrational heart that no physician could get to the root of it. Inspected, palpated, ausculated, percussed, radiographed, and cardiographed, it was all that a heart should be. Buttoned up and left to perform, it was like Petrouchka in his box. One moment in such labour that it seemed on the point of seizing, the next in such ebullition that it seemed on the point of bursting. It was the mediation between these extremes that Neary called the Apmonia. When he got tired of calling it the Apmonia, he called it the Isonomy. When he got sick of the sound of Isonomy he called the the Attunement. But he might call it what he liked, into Murphy.s heart it would not enter. Neary could not blend the opposites in Murphy.s heart.
- Murphy

She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.
- Murphy

.Humanity is a well with two buckets,. said Wylie, .one going down to be filled, the other coming up to be emptied..
- Murphy

.Once a certain degree of insight has been reached,. said Wylie, .all men talk, when talk they must, the same tripe..
- Murphy

I believe him, I know it.s my only chance to . my only chance, I believe all I.m told, I.ve disbelieved only too much in my long life, now I swallow everything, greedily. What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I.m not sure of it.
- Molloy

...you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is black and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.
- Molloy

How agreeable it is to be confirmed, after a more or less long period of vacillation, in one.s first impressions. Perhaps this is what tempers the pangs of death.
- Molloy

What a rest to speak of bicycles and horns. Unfortunately it is not of them I have to speak, but of her who brought me into the world, through the hole in her arse if my memory is correct. First taste of the shit.
- Molloy

I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is the great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit. And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck.
- Molloy

Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.
- Molloy

What I liked in anthropology was its inexhaustible faculty of negation, its relentless definition of man, as though he were no better than God, in terms of what he is not.
- Molloy

But I do not think even Sisyphus is required to scratch himself, or to groan, or to rejoice, as the fashion is now, always at the same appointed places. And it may even be they are not too particular about the route he takes provided it gets him to his destination safely and on time. And perhaps he thinks each journey is his first. This would keep hope alive, would it not, hellish hope. Whereas to see yourself doing the same thing endlessly over and over againfills you with satisfaction.
- Molloy

Oh the stories I could tell you if I were easy. What a rabble in my head, what a gallery of moribunds. Murphy, Watt, Yerk, Mercier and all the others. I would never have believed that . yes, I believe it willingly. Stories, stories. I have not yet been able to tell them. I shall not be able to tell this one.
- Molloy

But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one that offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was condemned to be. Or it was like a kind of clawing towards a light and countenance I could not name, that I had once known and long denied.
- Molloy

Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.
- Malone Dies

Decidedly the night is long and poor in counsel.
- Malone Dies

I simply believe that I can say nothing that is not true, I mean that has not happened, it.s not the same thing but no matter. Yes, that.s what I like about me, at least on of the things, that I can say, Up the Republic!, for example, or, Sweetheart!, for example, without having to wonder whether I should not rather have cut my tongue out, or said something else.
- Malone Dies

I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.
- Malone Dies

Or I might be able to catch one, a little girl for example, and half strangle her, three quarters, until she promises to give me my stick, give me soup, empty my pots, kiss me, fondle me, smile to me, give me my hat, stay with me, follow the hearse weeping into her handkerchief, that would be nice. I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it that nobody ever noticed it?
- Malone Dies

I must be happy, he said, it is less pleasant than I should have thought.
- Malone Dies

And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.
- The Unnamable

That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else could be asked of me? But the absurd! Of me whom they have reduced to reason.
- The Unnamable

If I have said anything to the contrary I was mistaken. If I say anything to the contrary again I shall be mistaken again. Unless I am mistaken now. Into the dossier with it in any case, in support of whatever thesis you fancy.
- The Unnamable

Is not a uniform suffering preferable to one which, by its ups and downs, is liable at certain moments to encourage the view that perhaps after all it is not eternal?
-The Unnamable

My mistakes are my life.
- How It Is

Better hope deferred than none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken. Company too up to a point. Better a sick heart than none. Till it starts to break. So speaking of himself he concludes for the time being, For the time being leave it at that.
- Company

You were saying something nice about me, I can feel it.
- Eleuthéria

I say farce deliberately, in the hope of covering up for you. That.s what our best authors do, they call their most serious works farces, in case no one is prepared to take them seriously.
- Eleuthéria

SPECTATOR: Actually, who wrote this rubbish? (checks programme) Beckett (he says Béké), Samuel, Béké, Béké, he must be a cross between a Jew from Greenland and a peasant from the Auvergne.
GLAZIER: Never heard of him. Seems he eats his soup with a fork.
SPECTATOR: Doesn.t matter. Remainder him...
- Eleuthéria

If I was dead, I wouldn.t know I was dead. That.s the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death. That.s where liberty lies: to see oneself dead.
- Eleuthéria

He stopped crying. You have replaced him as it were. 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. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.
- Waiting for Godot

NELL: One mustn.t laugh at those things, Nagg. Why must you always laugh at them?
NAGG: Not so loud!
NELL (without lowering her voice): Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But.
NAGG (shocked): Oh! NELL: Yes, yes, it.s the most comic thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it.s always the same thing. Yes, it.s like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don.t laugh any more.
- Endgame

Something of this is being heard, I am not merely talking to myself, that is in the wilderness, a thing I could never bear to do . for any length of time. (Pause.) That is what enables me to go on, go on talking that is. (Pause.) Whereas if you were to die . (smile) . to speak in the old style . (smile off) . or go away and leave me, then what would I do, what could I do, all day long, I mean between the bell for waking and the bell for sleep? (Pause.) Simply gaze before me with compressed lips.
- Happy Days

the churn of stale words in the heart again love love love thud of the old plunger pestling the unalterable whey of words
-Cascando

I don't know when I died. It always seemed to me I died old, about ninety years old, and what years, and that my body bore it out, from head to foot. But his evening alone in my icy bed, I have the feeling I'll be older than the day, the night, when the sky with all it slights fell upon me, the same I had so often gazed on since my first stumblings on the distant earth. For I'm too frightened this evening to listen to myself rot, waiting for the great red lapses of the heart, the tearings at the caecal walls, and for the slow killings to finish in my skull, the assaults on unshakable pillars, the fornications with corpses. So I'll tell myself a story, I'll tell myself another story, to try and calm myself, and it's there I feel I'll be old, old, even older than the day I fell, calling for help, and it came. Or is it possible that in this story I have come back to life, after my death? No, it's not like me to come back to life, after my death.
- The Calmative

So now he sagged on the stanchion in the grateful mizzle after the supreme adieu, his hands in jelly in his lap, his head drooped over his hands, pumping up the little blirt. He sat working himself up to the little gush of tears that would exonerate him. When he felt them coming he switched off his mind and let them settle. First the cautious gyring of her in his mind till it thudded and spun with the thought of her, then not a second too soon the violent voiding and blanking of his mind so that the gush was quelled, it was balked and driven back for a da capo. He found that the best way was to turn over the piston in the first instance was to think of the beret that she had snatched off to wave when the ship began to draw clear. The sun had bleached it from green to a very poignant reseda and it had always, from the very first moment he clapped eyes on it, affected him as being a most shabby, hopeless and moving article. It might have been a tuft of grass growing the way she ripped it off her little head and began to wave it with an idiotic clockwork movement of her arm, up and down, not to flutter it like a handkerchief, but grasping it in the middle to raise it and lower it with a stiff arm as though she were doing an exercise with a dumb-bell. The least reference of his thought now to these valedictory jerks, the monstrous grief in the hand clutching the livid beret like a pestle and pounding up and down, so that every stroke of the stiff arm seemed to bray his heart and propel her out of his sight, was enough to churn his mind into the requisite storm of misery. He found this out after a few false starts. So, having fixed the technique, he sat on working himself up to the little teary ejaculation, choking it back in the very act of emission, waiting with his mind blank for it to subside, and then when everything was in order switching on the tragic beret and the semaphore vale and starting all over again. He sat hunched on the stanchion in the evening mizzle, forcing and foiling the ebullition in this curious way, and his hands were two clammy cadaverous slabs of cod in his lap.
- Dream of Fair to Middling Women

We're not beginning ...to ... to ... mean something? Mean something? You and I mean something?
- Endgame

One day you'll be blind like me. You'll be sitting here, a speck in the void, in the dark, forever, like me. (Pause.) One day you'll say to yourself, I'm tired, I'll sit down, and you'll go and sit down. Then you'll say, I'm hungry, I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up. You'll say, I shouldn't have sat down, but since I have I'll sit on a little longer, then I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up and you won't get anything to eat. (Pause.) You'll look at the wall a while, then you'll say, I'll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I'll feel better, and you'll close them. And when you open them again there'll be no wall any more. (Pause.) Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn't fill it, and there you'll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe. (Pause.)
- Endgame

NELL (without lowering her voice): Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But-- NAGG (shocked): Oh! NELL: Yes, yes, it's the most comic thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.
- Endgame

HAMM: Use your head, can't you, use your head, you're on earth, there's no cure for that! (Pause) Get out of here and love one another! Lick your neighbor as your self!
- Endgame

Then Pim the lost tins the groping hand the arse the two cries mine mute the birth of hope with it get it over have it behind me feel the heart going hear it said you're nearly there.
- How It Is

Right leg right arm push pull ten yards fifteen years arrival new place readaptation prayer to sleep pending which questions if necessary who they were what beings what point of the earth.
- How It Is

Alone in the mud yes the dark yes sure yes panting yes someone hears me no no one hears me no murmuring sometimes yes when the panting stops yes not at other times no in the mud yes to the mud yes my voice yes mine yes not another's no mine alone yes sure yes when the panting stops yes on and off yes a few words yes a few scraps yes that no one hears no but less and less no answer less and less yes.
- How It Is

Instead of me sticking the opener into Pim's arse Bom sticking it into mine.
- How It Is

And instead of Pim's cries his song and exhorted voice be heard indistinguishably similar to mine.
- How It Is

But we shall never see Bom at work I shall pant on in abeyance in the dark the mud the voice being so ordered I quote that or our total life it states only three quarters.
- How It Is

I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.
- Malone Dies

Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.
- Malone Dies

Decidedly the night is long and poor in counsel.
- Malone Dies

I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.
- Malone Dies

Or I might be able to catch one, a little girl for example, and half strangle her, three quarters, until she promises to give me my stick, give me soup, empty my pots, kiss me, fondle me, smile to me, give me my hat, stay with me, follow the hearse weeping into her handkerchief, that would be nice. I am such a good man, at bottom, such a good man, how is it that nobody ever noticed it?
- Malone Dies

I must be happy, he said, it is less pleasant than I should have thought.
- Malone Dies

For there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.
- Malone Dies

But I do not think even Sisyphus is required to scratch himself, or to groan, or to rejoice, as the fashion is now, always at the same appointed places. And it may even be they are not too particular about the route he takes provided it gets him to his destination safely and on time. And perhaps he thinks each journey is his first. This would keep hope alive, would it not, hellish hope. Whereas to see yourself doing the same thing endlessly over and over again fills you with satisfaction.
- Molloy

How agreeable it is to be confirmed, after a more or less long period of vacillation, in one's first impressions. Perhaps this is what tempers the pangs of death.
- Molloy

I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly in a vehicle of some kind. I was helped.
- Molloy

What I liked in anthropology was its inexhaustible faculty of negation, its relentless definition of man, as though he were no better than God, in terms of what he is not.
- Molloy

But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one that offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was condemned to be. Or it was like a kind of clawing towards a light and countenance I could not name, that I had once known and long denied.
- Molloy

Say what you will, you can't keep a dead mind down.
- More Pricks Than Kicks

His plan therefore was not to refuse admission to the idea, but to keep it at bay until his mind was ready to receive it. Then let it in and pulverise it. Obliterate the bastard.
- More Pricks Than Kicks

The sun shone, having no alternative on the nothing new.
- Murphy

The sun shone, having no alternative on the nothing new.
- Murphy

He sat naked in his rocking-chair of undressed teak, guaranteed not to crack, warp, shrink, corrode, or creak at night. It was his own, it never left him. The corner in which he sat was curtained off from the sun, the poor old sun in the Virgin again for the billionth time. Seven scarves held him in position. Two fastened his shins to the rockers, one his thighs to the seat, two his breast and belly to the back, one his wrists to the strut behind. Only the most local movements were possible. Sweat poured off him, tightened the thongs. The breath was not perceptible . The eyes, cold and unwavering as a gull's, started up at an iridescence splashed over the cornice molding, shrinking and fading. Somewhere a cuckoo-clock, having struck between twenty and thirty, became the echo of a street-cry, which now entering the mew gave Quid pro quo! Quid pro quo! directly. These were sights and sounds that he did not like. They detained him in the world to which they belonged, but not he, as he fondly hoped. He wondered dimly what was breaking up his sunlight, what wares were being cried. Dimly, very dimly. He sat in his chair in this way because it gave him pleasure! First it gave his body pleasure, it appeased his body. Then it set him free in his mind. For it was not until his body was appeased that he could come alive in his mind, as described in section six. And life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word.
- Murphy

He listened for a little to the dead line, he dropped the receiver on the floor, he fastened his hand back to the strut, he worked up the chair. Slowly he felt better, astir in his mind, in the freedom of that light and dark that did not clash, nor alternate, nor fade nor lighten except to their communion, as described in section six. The rock got faster and faster, shorter and shorter, the iridescence was gone, the cry in the mew was gone, soon his body would be quiet. Most things under the moon got slower and then stopped, a rock got faster and faster and then stopped. Soon his body would be quiet, soon he would be free.
- Murphy

The knuckles stood out white under the skin in the usual way - that was the position. The hands then opened quite correctly to the utmost limit of their compass-that was the negation. It now seemed to Murphy that there were two equally legitimate ways in which the gesture might be concluded, and the sublation effected. The hands might be clapped to the head in a smart gesture of despair, or let fall limply to the seams of the trousers, supposing that to have been their point of departure. Judge then of his annoyance when Neary clenched them again more violently than before and dashed them against his breast-bone.
- Murphy

Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.
- The Unnamable

I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me.
- The Unnamable

What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, now proceed? By aporia pure and simple?
- The Unnamable

I shall not be alone, in the beginning. I am of course alone. Alone. That is soon said. Things have to be soon said. And how can one be sure, in such darkness?
- The Unnamable

I don't feel that either, words falling, you don't know where, you don't know whence, drops of silence through the silence, I don't feel it, I don't feel a mouth on me, nor a head, do I feel an ear, frankly now, do I feel an ear, well frankly now I don't, so much the worse, I don't feel an ear either, this is awful, make an effort, I must feel something, yes, I feel something, they say I feel something, I don't know what it is, I don't know what I feel, tell me what I feel and I'll tell you who I am, they'll tell me who I am, and I'll have heard, without an ear I'll have heard, and I'll have said it, without a mouth I'll have said it, I'll have said it inside me, then in the same breath outside me, perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong to either.
- The Unnamable

Is not a uniform suffering preferable to one which, by its ups and downs, is liable at certain moments to encourage the view that perhaps after all it is not eternal?
- The Unnamable

. . . where am I, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
- The Unnamable

Let's go. Yes, let's go. (They do not move).
- Waiting for Godot

Nothing to be done.
- Waiting for Godot

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. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.
- Waiting for Godot

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps.
- Waiting for Godot

Pozzo: I don't seem to be able . . . (long hesitation) to depart. Estragon: Such is life.
- Waiting for Godot

Vladimir: Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other (he searches for the contrary of saved) damned. Estragon: Saved from what?
- Waiting for Godot

Estragon: What about hanging ourselves? Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection. Estragon: (highly excited). An erection!
- Waiting for Godot

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let's go. They do not move.
- Waiting for Godot

We are all born mad. Some remain so.
- Waiting for Godot

Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. 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!
- Waiting for Godot

But that is not the question. Why are we here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come.
- Waiting for Godot

To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?
- Waiting for Godot

. . .in all that what truth will there be? Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener.
- Waiting for Godot

We wait. We are bored. (He throws up his hand.) No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste. . .In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!
- Waiting for Godot

The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good, it is the ethical laugh. The hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true, it is the intellectual laugh . . . But the mirthless laugh is the dianoetic laugh, down the snout - Haw! - so. It is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus (pure laugh), the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs . . . at that which is unhappy.
- Watt

...nothing changed in Mr. Knott's establishment, because nothing remained, nothing came or went, because all was a coming and a going.
- Watt

But he had hardly felt the absurdity of those things, on the one hand, and the necessity of those others, on the other, (for it is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity), when he felt the absurdity of those things of which he had just felt the necessity (for it is rare that the feeling of necessity is not followed by the feeling of absurdity.)
- Watt

Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better
- Worstward Ho!

Hand in hand with equal plod they go. In the free hands - no. Free empty hands. Backs turned both bowed with equal plod they go. The child hand raised to reach the holding hand. Hold the old holding hand. Hold and be held. Plod on and never recede. Slowly with never a pause plod on and never recede. Backs turned. Both bowed. Joined by held holding hands. Plod on as one. One shade. Another shade.
- Worstword Ho!