"We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?"

"I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation."

"To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."

"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."

"A mug's game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so."

"And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation ... Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant."

"In order to be company he must display a certain mental activity. But it need not be of a high order. Indeed it might be argued the lower the better. Up to a point. The lower the order of mental activity the better the company. Up to a point."

"Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence."

"But there are not two laws, that was the next thing I thought I understood, not two laws, one for the healthy, another for the sick, but one only to which all must bow, rich and poor, young and old, happy and sad. He was eloquent. I pointed out that I was not sad. That was a mistake. Your papers, he said, I knew it a moment later. Not at all, I said, not at all. Your papers! he cried. Ah my papers."

"Incontinent the void. The zenith. Evening again. When not night it will be evening. Death again of deathless day. On one hand embers. On the other ashes. Day without end won and lost. Unseen."

"You are on your back at the foot of an aspen. In its trembling shade. She at right angles propped on her elbows head between her hands. Your eyes opened and closed have looked in hers looking in yours. In your dark you look in them again. Still. You feel on your face the fringe of her long black hair stirring in the still air. Within the tent of hair your faces are hidden from view. She murmurs, Listen to the leaves. Eyes in each other's eyes you listen to the leaves. In their trembling shade."

"Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto."

"I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning."

"Do we mean love, when we say love?"

"In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness."

"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."

"That's how it is on this bitch of an earth."

"Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that's what I've had to make the best of."

"There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet."

"ESTRAGON: Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!VLADIMIR: Did I ever leave you?ESTRAGON: You let me go."

"Birth was the death of him."

"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 deadener.At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing.Let him sleep on."

"It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution."

"I asked her to look at me and after a few moments - (pause) - after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low) Let me in."

"Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don't there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little."

"Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer. They control the most simple Proustian episode, and an understanding of their mechanism must precede any particular analysis of their application."

"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

"And I seemed to see myself ageing as swiftly as a day-fly. But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one which 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 always condemned to be."

"In reality I said nothing at all, but I heard a murmur, something gone wrong with the silence, and I pricked up my ears, like an animal I imagine, which gives a start and pretends to be dead."

"But we know that we are no longer the same, and not only know that we are no longer the same, but know in what we are no longer the same, you wiser but not sadder, and I sadder but not wiser, for wiser I could hardly become without grave personal inconvenience, whereas sorrow is a thing you can keep on adding to all your life long, is it not, like a stamp or egg collection."

"Light heat all known all white heart breath no sound."

"How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life."

"Nor did he think of Celia any more, though he could sometimes remember having dreamt of her. If only he had been able to think of her, he would not have needed to dream of her."

"Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity."

"I always thought old age would be a writer's best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory's gone, all the old fluency's disappeared. I don't write a single sentence without saying to myself, 'It's a lie!' So I know I was right. It's the best chance I've ever had."

"Where I am, 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."

"But it is only since I have ceased to live that I think of these things and the other things. It is in the tranquillity 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."

"Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle."

"There's never an end for the sea."

"The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness."

"The more people I meet the happier I become."

"She began stroking my ankles. I considered kicking her in the cunt."

"He sometimes halted without saying anything. Either he had finally nothing to say or while having something to say he finally decided not to say it."

"When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckettas told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett."

"In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?"

"I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them."

"The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day."

"There he is then, the unfortunate brute, quite miserable because of me, for whom there is nothing to be done, and he so anxious to help, so used to giving orders and to being obeyed. There he is, ever since I came into the world, possibly at his instigation, I wouldn't put it past him, commanding me to be well, you know, in every way, no complaints at all, with as much success as if he were shouting at a lump of inanimate matter."

"James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can."

"And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another."