Murphy Quotes

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Any fool can turn a blind eye but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand.”
― Samuel Beckett, 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.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“The sensation of the seat of a chair coming together with his drooping posteriors at last was so delicious that he rose at once and repeated the sit, lingeringly and with intense concentration. Murphy did not so often meet with these tendernesses that he could afford to treat them casually. The second sit, however, was a great disappointment.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“He was split, one part of him never left this mental chamber that pictured itself as a sphere full of light fading into dark, because there was no way out. But motion in this world depended on rest in the world outside. A man is in bed, wanting to sleep. A rat is behind the wall at his head, wanting to move. The man hears the rat fidget and cannot sleep, the rat hears the man fidget and dares not move. They are both unhappy, one fidgeting and the other waiting, or both happy, the rat moving and the man sleeping.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Yes or no?' said Murphy. The eternal tautology.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“You, my body, my mind...one must go.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“But how much more pleasant was the sensation of being a missile without provenance or target, caught up in a tumult of non-Newtonian motion. So pleasant that pleasant was not the word.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“So all things limp together for the only possible.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“When the fool supports the knave, the good man may fold his hands. The fool in league with the knave against himself is a combination that none may withstand. Oh, monster of humanity and enlightenment, despairing of a world in which the only natural allies are the fools and knaves, a mankind sterile with self-complicity.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“And life in his mind gave him pleasure, such pleasure that pleasure was not the word.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“The 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.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“the last at last seen of him
himself unseen by him
and of himself"

A rest.

The last Mr. Murphy saw of Mr. Endon was Mr. Murphy unseen by Mr. Endon. This was also the last Murphy saw of Murphy."

A rest.

The relation between Mr. Murphy and Mr. Endon could not have better summed up than by the former's sorrow at seeing himself in the latter's immunity from seeing anything but himself."

A long rest.

Mr. Murphy is a speck in Mr. Endon's unseen.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“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, Murphy

“But politeness and candour run together, when one is not fitting neither is the other. Then the occasion calls for silence, that frail partition between the ill-concealed and the ill-revealed, the clumsily false and the unavoidably so.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Neary’s conception of friendship was very curious. He expected it to last. He never said, when speaking of an enemy: “He used to be a friend of mine”, but always, with affected precision: “I used to think he was a friend of mine.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“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.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Some hours later Cooper took the packet of ash from his pocket, where earlier in the evening he had put it for greater security, and threw it angrily at a man who had given him great offence. It bounced, burst, off the wall on to the floor, where at once it became the object of much dribbling, passing, trapping, shooting, punching, heading and even some recognition from the gentleman's code. By closing time the body, mind and soul of Murphy were freely distributed over the floor of the saloon; and before another dayspring greyened the earth had been swept away with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“It was a strange room, the door hanging off its hinges, and yet a telephone. But its last occupant was a harlot, long past her best, which had been scarlet.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“the last at last seen of him
himself unseen by him
and of himself”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Soon his body was quiet.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“A peristalsis of light, worming its way into the dark.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Murphy was one of the elect, who require everything to remind them of something else.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Yalınlık bir cenaze arabası kadar ağır ve bir idam mahkûmunun son kahvaltısı kadar uzundur.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Murphy’s respect for the imponderables of personality was profound,”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Scratch an old man and find a Quintilian.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“هر عارضه‌ای که تسکین پیدا کند عارضه‌ای دیگر به وخامت می‌گراید.
بشر یک چاه است با دو سطل. یکی پایین می‌رود تا پر شود، دیگری بالا می‌آید تا خالی شود ...”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“The ludicrous fever of toys struggling skyward, the sky itself more and more remote, the wind tearing the awning of cloud to tatters, pale limitless blue and green recessions laced with strands of scud, the light failing—once she would have noticed these things.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“She was willing a little bit of sweated labour, incapable of betraying the slogan of her slavers, that since the customer or sucker was paying for his gutrot ten times what it cost to produce and five times what it cost to fling in his face, it was only reasonable to defer to his complaints up to but not exceeding fifty per cent of his exploitation.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“It was like looking for a needle in a haystack full of vipers.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy