As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places.

— Samuel Beckett

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. But habit is a great deadened. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing. Let him sleep on.

— Samuel Beckett

Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.

— Samuel Beckett

Birth was the death of him.

— Samuel Beckett

Bloom of adulthood. Try a whiff of that. On your back in the dark you remember. Ah, you remember. Cloudless May day. She joins you in the little summerhouse. Entirely of logs. Both larch and fir. Six feet across. Eight from floor to vertex. Area twenty-four square feet to the furthest decimal. Two small multicolored lights vis-à-vis. Small stained diamond panes. Under each a ledge. There on summer Sundays after his midday meal your father loved to retreat with Punch and a cushion. The waist of his trousers unbuttoned he sat on the one ledge and turned the pages. You on the other your feet dangling. When he chuckled you tried to chuckle too. When his chuckle died yours too. That you should try to imitate his chuckle pleased and amused him greatly, and sometimes he would chuckle for no other reason than to hear you try to chuckle too. Sometimes you turn your head and look out through a rose-red pane. You press your little nose against the pane and all without is rosy. The years have flown and there at the same place as then you sit in the bloom of adulthood bathed in rainbow light gazing before you. She is late.

— Samuel Beckett

Boys my age with whom, in spite of everything, I was obliged to mix occasionally, mocked me.

— Samuel Beckett

But even them, my pains, I understand ill. That must come from my not being all pain and nothing else. There's the rub. Then they recede, or I, till they fill me with amaze and wonder, seen from a better planet. Not often, but I ask no more. Catch-cony life! To be nothing but pain, how that would simplify matters! Omnipotent! Impious dream.

— Samuel Beckett

But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.

— Samuel Beckett

But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think of these things and the other things. It is in the tranquility of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life, and that I judge it, as it is said that God will judge me, and with no less impertinence. To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don't torment me, but one sometimes forgets.

— Samuel Beckett

But mostly not for nothing never quite for nothing even stillest night when air too still for even the lightest leaf to sound no not to sound to carry too still for even the lightest leaf to carry the brief way here and not die the sound not die on the brief way the wave not die away.

— Samuel Beckett