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What Is More True Than Anything Else? To Swim Is True And To Sink Is True. One Cannot Speak Any More Of Being, One Must Speak Onlyof The Mess.

-Samuel Beckett

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What Is More True

Samuel Beckett

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What Is More True Than Anything Else? To Swim Is True And To Sink Is True. One Cannot Speak Any More Of Being, One Must Speak Onlyof The Mess.

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So All Things Limp Together For The Only Possible.

Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better.

My Life, My Life, Now I Speak Of It As Of Something Over, Now As Of A Joke Which Still Goes On, And It Is Neither, For At The Same Time It Is Over And It Goes On, And Is There Any Tense For That? Watch Wound And Buried By The Watchmaker, Before He Died, Whose Ruined Works Will One Day Speak Of God, To The Worms.

I Know Those Little Phrases That Seem So Innocuous, And, Once You Let Them In, Pollute The Whole Of Speech. 'nothing Is More Real Than Nothing.' They Rise Up Out Of The Pit And Know No Rest Until They Drag You Down Into Its Dark.

To Have Been Always What I Am - And So Changed From What I Was.

When A Man In A Forest Thinks He Is Going Forward In A Straight Line, In Reality He Is Going In A Circle, I Did My Best To Go In A Circle, Hoping To Go In A Straight Line.

What Is That Unforgettable Line?

All I Want To Do Is Sit On My Ass And Fart And Think Of Dante.

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.

I Say Me, Knowing All The While It's Not Me.

In The Landscape Of Extinction, Precision Is Next To Godliness.

I Love Order. It's My Dream. A World Where All Would Be Silent And Still, And Each Thing In Its Last Place, Under The Last Dust.

Name, No, Nothing Is Nameable, Tell, No, Nothing Can Be Told, What Then, I Don't Know, I Shouldn't Have Begun.

Enough Of Acting The Infant Who Has Been Told So Often How He Was Found Under A Cabbage That In The End He Remembers The Exact Spot In The Garden And The Kind Of Life He Led There Before Joining The Family Circle.

The End Is In The Beginning And Yet You Go On.

There's Never An End For The Sea.

If I Had The Use Of My Body, I Would Throw It Out The Window.

Against The Charitable Gesture There Is No Defence.

What Can It Matter To Me, That I Succeed Or Fail ? The Undertaking Is None Of Mine, If They Want Me To Succeed I'll Fail, And Vice Versa, So As Not To Be Rid Of My Tormentors.

Words Are The Clothes Thoughts Wear.

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.

There Is This To Be Said For Dachsunds Of Such Length And Lowness As Nelly, That It Makes Very Little Difference To Their Appearance Whether They Stand, Sit Or Lie.

James Joyce: His Writing Is Not About Something. It Is The Thing Itself.

It's A Lot To Ask Of One Creature, It's A Lot To Ask, That He Should First Behave As If He Were Not, Then As If He Were, Before Being Admitted To That Peace Where He Neither Is, Nor Is Not, And Where The Language Dies That Permits Of Such Expressions.

I Can't Go On. I'll Go On.

Hold The Old Holding Hand. Hold And Be Held. Plod On And Never Recede. Slowly With Never A Pause Plod On And Never Recede.

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.

Every Word Is Like An Unnecessary Stain On Silence And Nothingness.

In My Head There Are Several Windows, That I Do Know, But Perhaps It Is Always The Same One, Open Variously On The Parading Universe.

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.

The Confusion Is Not My Invention. We Cannot Listen To A Conversation For Five Minutes Without Being Aware Of The Confusion. It Is All Around Us And Our Only Chance Now Is To Let It In. The Only Chance Of Renovation Is To Open Our Eyes And See The Mess. It Is Not A Mess You Can Make Sense Of.

Nothing Is Funnier Than Unhappiness, I Grant You That. Yes, Yes, It's The Most Comical Thing In The World.

Habit Is The Ballast That Chains The Dog To His Vomit.

All Poetry, As Discriminated From The Various Paradigms Of Prosody, Is Prayer.

It Is Useless Not To Seek, Not To Want, For When You Cease To Seek You Start To Find, And When You Cease To Want, Then Life Begins To Ram Her Fish And Chips Down Your Gullet Until You Puke, And Then The Puke Down Your Gullet Until You Puke The Puke, And Then The Puked Puke Until You Begin To Like It.

The Reality Of The Individualis An Incoherent Reality And Must Be Expressed Incoherently.

Spend The Years Of Learning Squandering Courage For The Years Of Wandering Through A World Politely Turning From The Loutishness Of Learning.

All That Is Active, All That Is Enveloped In Time And Space, Is Endowed With What Might Be Described As An Abstract, Ideal And Absolute Impermeability.

We Spend Our Life, It's Ours, Trying To Bring Together In The Same Instant A Ray Of Sunshine And A Free Bench

Estragon: Suppose We Repented. Vladimir: Repented What? Estragon: Oh...(he Reflects.) We Wouldn’t Have To Go Into The Details. Vladimir: Our Being Born?

That Penny Farthing Hell You Call Your Mind

Be Again, Be Again. (pause.) All That Old Misery. (pause.) Once Wasn't Enough For You.

Yes, There Is No Denying It, Any Longer, It Is Not You Who Are Dead, But All The Others. So You Get Up And Go To Your Mother, Who Thinks She Is Alive. That's My Impression. But Now I Shall Have To Get Myself Out Of This Ditch. How Joyfully I Would Vanish Here, Sinking Deeper And Deeper Under The Rains.

In Reality We Are One And All From The Unthinkable First To The No Less Unthinkable Last Glued Together In A Vast Imbrication Of Flesh Without Breach Or Fissure

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. A Ton Of Worms In An Acre, That Is A Wonderful Thought, A Ton Of Worms, I Believe It.

Ah, The Old Questions, The Old Answers, There's Nothing Like Them!

Dying For Dark — And The Darker The Worse. Strange.

I Hope I Am Not Too Old To Take It Up Seriously, Nor Too Stupid About Machines To Qualify As A Commercial Pilot. I Do Not Feel Like Spending The Rest Of My Life Writing Books That No One Will Read. It Is Not As Though I Wanted To Write Them.

Nothing Is More Real Than Nothing.

Waiting For Godot

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 Blank And Flat And The Whole Ghastly Business Looks Like What It Is, Senseless, Speechless, Issueless Misery.

Yesterday Is Not A Milestone That Has Been Passed, But A Daystone On The Beaten Track Of The Years, And Irremediably Part Of Us, Within Us, Heavy And Dangerous. We Are Not Merely More Weary Because Of Yesterday, We Are Other, No Longer What We Were Before The Calamity Of Yesterday.

Estragon: We Always Find Something, Eh Didi, To Give Us The Impression We Exist? Vladimir: Yes, Yes, We're Magicians.

Waiting For Godot

The Old Endless Chain Of Love, Tolerance, Indifference, Aversion And Disgust

You're On Earth. There's No Cure For That.

I Lay Down Across Her With My Face In Her Breasts And My Hand On Her. We Lay There Without Moving. But Under Us All Moved, And Moved Us, Gently, Up And Down, And From Side To Side.

Reality, Whether Approached Imaginatively Or Empirically, Remains A Surface, Hermetic.

To Find A Form That Accommodates The Shape Of The Mess, That Is The Task Of The Artist Now.

God Is Love. Yes Or No? No.

All Has Not Been Said And Never Will Be.

Where You Have Nothing, There You Should Want Nothing.

But I Know What Darkness Is, It Accumulates, Thickens, Then Suddenly Bursts And Drowns Everything.

Poets Are The Sense, Philosophers The Intelligence Of Humanity.

The Time Is Perhaps Not Altogether Too Green For The Vile Suggestion That Art Has Nothing To Do With Clarity, Does Not Dabble In The Clear And Does Not Make Clear, And More Than The Light Of Day (or Night) Makes The Subsolar, -lunar, And -stellar Excrement. Art Is The Sun, Moon, And Stars Of The Mind, The Whole Mind.

Two In Distressmake Sorrow Less.

Habit Is A Compromise Effected Between The Individual And His Environment, Or Between The Individual And His Own Organic Eccentricities, The Guarantee Of A Dull Inviolability, The Lightning-conductor Of His Existence.

I Knew It Would Soon Be The End, So I Played The Part, You Know, The Part Of — How Shall I Say, I Don’t Know.

What Are We Doing Here, That Is The Question. And We Are Blessed In This, That We Happen To Know The Answer. Yes, In The Immense Confusion One Thing Alone Is Clear. We Are Waiting For Godot To Come

Enough To Know No Knowing.

The Only Sin Is The Sin Of Being Born.

Do You Always Believe In The Life To Come? Mine Was Always That.

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.

To Restore Silence Is The Role Of Objects.

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.

The Blind Have No Notion Of Time. The Things Of Time Are Hidden From Them Too.

The End Of A Life Is Always Vivifying.

The Essential Doesn't Change.

Words And Images Run Riot In My Head, Pursuing, Flying, Clashing, Merging, Endlessly. But Beyond This Tumult There Is A Great Calm, And A Great Indifference, Never Really To Be Troubled By Anything Again.

The Sky Sinks In The Morning, This Fact Has Been Insufficiently Observed.

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.

Use It Or Lose It

There's No Lack Of Void.

I Have Nothing But Wastes And Wilds Of Self-translation Before Me For Many Miserable Months To Come.

Nothing Is Funnier Than Unhappiness, I Grant You That… Yes, Yes, It's The Most Comical 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.

There Are Two Moments Worthwhile In Writing, The One When You Start And The Other When You Throw It In The Waste-paper Basket.

Let Me Go To Hell, That's All I Ask, And Go On Cursing Them There, And Them Look Down And Hear Me, That Might Take Some Of The Shine Off Their Bliss.

Finished, It's Finished, Nearly Finished, It Must Be Nearly Finished. Grain Upon Grain, One By One, And One Day, Suddenly, There's A Heap, A Little Heap, The Impossible Heap. I Can't Be Punished Any More. I'll Go Now To My Kitchen, Ten Feet By Ten Feet By Ten Feet, And Wait For Him To Whistle Me. Nice Dimensions, Nice Proportions, I'll Lean On The Table, And Look At The Wall, And Wait For Him To Whistle Me.

Do We Mean Love, When We Say Love?

I Have Always Been Amazed At My Contemporaries’ Lack Of Finesse, I Whose Soul Writhed From Morning To Night, In The Mere Quest Of Itself.

The Tuesday Scowls, The Wednesday Growls, The Thursday Curses, The Friday Howls, The Saturday Snores, The Sunday Yawns, The Monday Morns, The Monday Morns. The Whacks, The Moans, The Cracks, The Groans, The Welts, The Squeaks, The Belts, The Shrieks, The Pricks, The Prayers, The Kicks, The Tears, The Skelps, And The Yelps.

The Loss Of My Sight Was A Great Fillip. If I Could Go Deaf And Dumb I Think I Might Pant On To Be A Hundred.

Then I Went Back Into The House And Wrote, It Is Midnight. The Rain Is Beating On The Windows. It Was Not Midnight. It Was Not Raining.

How All Becomes Clear And Simple When One Opens An Eye On The Within, Having Of Course Previously Exposed It To The Without, In Order To Benefit By The Contrast.

That Passed The Time. It Would Have Passed In Any Case. Yes, But Not So Rapidly.

Habit Is A Compromise Effected Between An Individual And His Environment.

Deplorable Mania, When Something Happens, To Inquire What.

The Time-state Of Attainment Eliminates So Accurately The Time-state Of Aspiration, That The Actual Seems The Inevitable, And, All Conscious Intellectual Effort To Reconstitute The Invisible And Unthinkable As A Reality Being Fruitless, We Are Incapable Of Appreciating Our Joy By Comparing It With Our Sorrow.

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. Come, Let's Get To Work! (he Advances Towards The Heap, Stops In His Stride.) In An Instant All Will Vanish And We'll Be Alone More, In The Midst Of Nothingness!

Hardly Had The Glow Been Kindled By Some Good Deed On Your Part Or By Some Little Triumph Over Your Rivals Or By A Word Of Praisefrom Your Parents Or Mentors When It Would Begin To Cool And Fade Leaving You In A Very Short Time As Chill And Dim As Before.

I Still Smile It's Not Worth The Trouble Any More For A Long Time Now It's Not Been Worth The Trouble The Tongue Spring Goes Into The Mud I Stay Like This Not Thirsty Any More The Tongue Goes Back Into The Mouth It Closes It Has To Make A Straight Line Now It's Done I've Made The Image.

It's So Nice To Know Where You're Going, In The Early Stages. It Almost Rids You Of The Wish To Go There.

Poetry Is Essentially The Antithesis Of Metaphysics: Metaphysics Purge The Mind Of The Senses And Cultivate The Disembodiment Of The Spiritual; Poetry Is All Passionate And Feeling And Animates The Inanimate; Metaphysics Are Most Perfect When Concerned With Universals; Poetry, When Most Concerned With Particulars.

Don't Look For Meaning In The Words. Listen To The Silences.

The Bicycle Is A Great Good. But It Can Turn Nasty, If Ill Employed.

Normally I Didn’t See A Great Deal. I Didn’t Hear A Great Deal Either. I Didn’t Pay Attention. Strictly Speaking I Wasn’t There. Strictly Speaking I Believe I’ve Never Been Anywhere.

Clear To Me At Last That The Dark I Have Always Struggled To Keep Under Is In Reality My Most

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.

Watt's Concern, Deep As It Appeared, Was Not After All What The Figure Was, In Reality, But With What The Figure Appeared To Be, In Reality.

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.

I Open The Door Of The Cell And Go. I Am So Bowed I Only See My Feet, If I Open My Eyes, And Between My Legs A Little Trail Of Black Dust. I Say To Myself That The Earth Is Extinguished, Though I Never Saw It Lit.

Already All Confusion. Things And Imaginings. As Of Always. Confusion Amounting To Nothing. Despite Precautions. If Only She Could Be Pure Figment. Unalloyed. This Old So Dying Woman. So Dead. In The Madhouse Of The Skull And Nowhere Else. Where No More Precautions To Be Taken. No Precautions Possible. Cooped Up There With The Rest. Hovel And Stones. The Lot. And The Eye. How Simple All Then. If Only All Could Be Pure Figment. Neither Be Nor Been Nor By Any Shift To Be. Gently Gently. On. Careful.

Watt Had Watched People Smile And Thought He Understood How It Was Done.

Sloth Is All Passions The Most Powerful.

The Essential Is Never To Arrive Anywhere, Never To Be Anywhere. The Essential Is To Go On Squirming Forever At The Edge Of The Line, As Long As There Are Waters And Banks And Ravening In Heaven A Sporting God To Plague His Creature, Per Pro His Chosen Shits. I've Swallowed Three Hooks And Am Still Hungry. Hence The Howls. What A Joy To Know Where One Is, And Where One Will Stay, Without Being There. Nothing To Do But Strech Out Comfortably On The Rack, In The Blissful Knowledge You Are Nobody For Eternity.

I've Tried Not To Exaggerate The Glory Of Athletes. I'd Rather, If I Could, Preserve A Sense Of Proportion, To Write About Them Asexcellent Ballplayers, First-rate Players. But I'm Sure I Have Contributed To False Values--as Stanley Woodward Said, "godding Up Those Ballplayers." The Sun Shone, Having No Alternative, On The Nothing New.

Nothing Happens. Nobody Comes, Nobody Goes. It's Awful.

Waiting For Godot

That Desert Of Loneliness And Recrimination That Men Call Love.

Dance First. Think Later. It's The Natural Order.

Love Requited Is A Short Circuit.

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.

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.)

What Is This Love That More Than All The Cursed Deadly Or Any Other Of Its Great Movers So Moves The Soul And Soul What Is This Soul That More Than By Any Of Its Great Movers Is By Love So Moved?

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.

You Are Not Satisfied Unless Form Is So Strictly Divorced From Content That You Can Comprehend The One Without Almost Without Bothering To Read The Other.

That's The Mistake I Made, One Of The Mistakes, To Have Wanted A Story For Myself, Whereas Life Alone Is Enough.

The Short Winter’s Day Was Drawing To A Close. It Seems To Me Sometimes That These Are The Only Days I Have Ever Known, And Especially That Most Charming Moment Of All, Just Before Night Wipes Them Out.

An Imaginative Adventure Does Not Enjoy The Same Corsets As Reportage.

Art Has Always Been This--pure Interrogation, Rhetorical Question Less The Rhetoric--whatever Else It May Have Been Obliged By Social Reality To Appear.

It's A Rare Thing Not To Have Been Bonny-- Once.

We Always Find Something, Eh Didi, To Let Us Think We Exist?

The Search For The Means To Put An End To Things, An End To Speech, Is What Enables The Discourse To Continue.

The Fact Would Seem To Be, If In My Situation One May Speak Of Facts, Not Only That I Shall Have To Speak Of Things Of Which I Cannot Speak, But Also, Which Is Even More Interesting, But Also That I, Which Is If Possible Even More Interesting, That I Shall Have To, I Forget, No Matter. And At The Same Time I Am Obliged To Speak. I Shall Never Be Silent. Never.

They Give Birth Astride Of A Grave, The Light Gleams An Instant, Then It's Night Once More.

I Pause To Record That I Feel In Extraordinary Form. Delirium Perhaps.

Not To Want To Say, Not To Know What You Want To Say, Not To Be Able To Say What You Think You Want To Say, And Never To Stop Saying, Or Hardly Ever, That Is The Thing To Keep In Mind, Even In The Heat Of Composition.

Birth Was The Death Of Him.

Yes, I Dont Know Why, But I Have Never Been Disappointed, And I Often Was In The Early Days, Without Feeling At The Same Time, Or A Moment Later, An Undeniable Relief.

Ever Tried. Ever Failed. No Matter. Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.' You Won't Believe What You Can Accomplish By Attempting The Impossible With The Courage To Repeatedly Fail Better.

Success And Failure On The Public Level Never Mattered Much To Me, In Fact I Feel More At Home With The Latter, Having Breathed Deep Of Its Vivifying Air All My Writing Life Up To The Last Couple Of Years.

I Am Still Alive Then. That May Come In Useful.

I Could Not Have Gone Through The Awful Wretched Mess Of Life Without Having Left A Stain Upon The Silence.

Never But The One Matter. The Dead And Gone. The Dying And Going. From The Word Go.

With All This Darkness Round Me I Feel Less Alone.

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.

Go On Failing. Go On. Only Next Time, Try To Fail Better.

Art Has Nothing To Do With Clarity, Does Not Dabble In The Clear And Does Not Make Clear

Vladimir: What Do They Say? Estragon: They Talk About Their Lives. Vladimir: To Have Lived Is Not Enough For Them. Estragon: They Have To Talk About It.

When The Object Is Perceived As Particular And Unique And Not Merely The Member Of A Family, When It Appears Independent Of Any General Notion And Detached From The Sanity Of A Cause, Isolated And Inexplicable In The Light Of Ignorance, Then And Only Then May It Be A Source Of Enchantment.

It Sometimes Happens And Will Sometimes Happen Again That I Forget Who I Am And Strut Before My Eyes, Like A Stranger.

We Are Not Saints, But We Have Kept Our Appointment. How Many People Can Boast As Much?

Friendship, According To Proust, Is The Negation Of That Irremediable Solitude To Which Every Human Being Is Condemned.

Yes, Light, There Is No Other Word For It.

It Is Better To Adopt The Simplest Explanation, Even If It Is Not Simple, Even If It Does Not Explain Very Much. A Bright Light Is Not Necessary, A Taper Is All One Needs To Live In Strangeness, If It Faithfully Burns.

My Mistakes Are My Life.

What Is More True Than Anything Else? To Swim Is True And To Sink Is True. One Cannot Speak Any More Of Being, One Must Speak Onlyof The Mess.

If You Do Not Love Me I Shall Not Be Loved If I Do Not Love You I Shall Not Love.

That's What Hell Must Be Like, Small Chat To The Babbling Of Lethe About The Good Old Days When We Wished We Were Dead.

Personally I Have No Bone To Pick With Graveyards, I Take The Air There Willingly, Perhaps More Willingly Than Elsewhere, When Take The Air I Must.

Dear Incomprehension, It's Thanks To You I'll Be Myself, In The End.

The Pendulum Oscillates Between These Two Terms: Suffering-that Opens A Window On The Real And Is The Main Condition Of The Artistic Experience, And Boredom ... That Must Be Considered As The Most Tolerable Because The Most Durable Of Human Evils.

Dublin University Contains The Cream Of Ireland: Rich And Thick.

Ireland And The Irish

To Find A Form That Accommodates The Mess, That Is The Task Of The Artist Now.

My Dear Tom, Delighted To Get Your Letter. Do Write Again. This Life Is Terrible And I Don't Understand How It Can Be Endured.

The Creation Of The World Did Not Take Place Once And For All Time, But Takes Place Every Day.

Our Vulgar Perception Is Not Concerned With Other Than Vulgar Phenomena.

Let Us Do Something, While We Have The Chance! ... Let Us Make The Most Of It, Before It Is Too Late! Let Us Represent Worthily For One The Foul Brood To Which A Cruel Fate Consigned Us!

I Had Seen Faces In Photographs I Might Have Found Beautiful Had I Known Even Vaguely In What Beauty Was Supposed To Consist. And My Father's Face, On His Death-bolster, Had Seemed To Hint At Some Form Of Aesthetics Relevant To Man. But The Faces Of The Living, All Grimace And Flush, Can They Be Described As Objects?

I Speak For An Art ... Weary Of Its Puny Exploits, Weary Of Pretending To Be Able, Of Being Able, Of Doing A Little Better The Same Old Thing, Of Going A Little Further Along A Dreary Road.

We Have Time To Grow Old. The Air Is Full Of Our Cries. But Habit Is A Great Deadener.

Waiting For Godot

...you Must Say Words, As Long As There Are Any, Until They Find Me, Until They Say Me, Strange Pain, Strange Sin, You Must Go On, Perhaps It's Done Already, Perhaps They Have Said Me Already, Perhaps They Have Carried Me To The Threshold Of My Story, Before The Door That Opens On My Story, That Would Surprise Me, If It Opens, It Will Be I, It Will Be The Silence, 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

Imagination At Wit's End Spreads Its Sad Wings.

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.

Love, That Is All I Asked, A Little Love, Daily, Twice Daily, Fifty Years Of Twice Daily Love Like A Paris Horse-butcher's Regular, What Normal Woman Wants Affection?

The Day You Die Is Just Like Any Other, Only Shorter.

For In Me There Have Always Been Two Fools, Among Others, One Asking Nothing Better Than To Stay Where He Is And The Other Imagining That Life Might Be Slightly Less Horrible A Little Further 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.

[t]he Syndrome Known As Life Is Too Diffuse To Admit Of Palliation. For Every Symptom That Is Eased, Another Is Made Worse. The Horse Leech's Daughter Is A Closed System. Her Quantum Of Wantum Cannot Vary.

Unhappy, But Not Unhappy Enough.

How Do You Manage It, She Said, At Your Age? I Told Her I'd Been Saving Up For Her All My Life.

But It Seems Impossible To Speak And Yet Say Nothing, You Think You Have Succeeded, But You Always Overlook Something.

Nothing Is Funnier Than Unhappiness.

God Is A Witness That Cannot Be Sworn.

Hamm: We're Not Beginning To... To... Mean Something? Clov: Mean Something! You And I, Mean Something! (brief Laugh.) Ah That's A Good One!

I Had Little Talent For Happiness.

Life Is Habit. Or Rather Life Is A Succession Of Habits.

To Be An Artist Is To Fail, As No Other Dare Fail, That Failure Is His World And The Shrink From Desertion, Art And Craft, Good Housekeeping, Living.

Sometimes I Wonder If I'm In My Right Mind. Then It Passes Off And I'm As Intelligent As Ever.

Silence And Darkness Were All I Craved. Well, I Get A Certain Amount Of Both. They Being One.

The Memory Came Faint And Cold Of The Story I Might Have Told, A Story In The Likeness Of My Life, I Mean Without The Courage To End Or The Strength To Go On.

I Tried To Groan, Help! Help! But The Tone That Came Out Was That Of Polite Conversation.

Asking For Help

What Do We Do Now, Now That We Are Happy?

We All Are Born Mad. Some Remain So.

Waiting For Godot

For The Only Way One Can Speak Of Nothing Is To Speak Of It As Though It Were Something, Just As The Only Way One Can Speak Of God Is To Speak Of Him As Though He Were A Man, Which To Be Sure He Was, In A Sense, For A Time, And As The Only Way One Can Speak Of Man, Even Our Anthropologists Have Realized That, Is To Speak Of Him As Though He Were A Termite.

I Cannot Explain My Plays. Each Must Find Out For Himself What Is Meant

...and A Dream Away In Space With Neither Her Nor There Where All The Footsteps Ever Fell Can Never Fare Nearer To Anywhere Nor From Anywhere Further Away. Nor For In The End Again By Degrees Or As Though Switched On Dark Falls There Again That Certain Dark That Alone Certain Ashes Can. Through It Who Knows Yet Another End Beneath A Cloudless Sky Of A Last End If Ever There Had To Be Another Absolutely Had To Be.

How Long Have I Been Here, What A Question, I've Often Wondered. And Often I Could Answer, An Hour, A Month, A Year, A Century, Depending On What I Meant By Here, And Me, And Being, And There I Never Went Looking For Extravagant Meanings, There I Never Much Varied, Only The Here Would Sometimes Seem To Vary.

I Am Interested In The Shape Of Ideas Even If I Do Not Believe In Them. There Is A Wonderful Sentence In Augustine . . . "do Not Despair: One Of The Thieves Was Saved; Do Not Presume: One Of The Thieves Was Damned." That Sentence Had A Wonderful Shape. It Is The Shape That Matters.

All I Know Is What The Words Know, And Dead Things, And That Makes A Handsome Little Sum, With A Beginning And A Middle And An End, As In The Well-built Phrase And The Long Sonata Of The Dead.

Yes, There Were Times When I Forgot Not Only Who I Was But That I Was, Forgot To Be.

We Could Have Saved Sixpence. We Could Have Saved Fivepence. But At What Cost?

If There Is One Question I Dread, To Which I Have Never Been Able To Invent A Satisfactory Reply, It Is The Question What Am I Doing.

The Only Thing You Must Never Speak Of Is Your Happiness.

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Shelagh Delaney

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