Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable Quotes

“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.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“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. ”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“It was she made me acquainted with love. She went by the peaceful name of Ruth I think, but I can't say for certain. Perhaps the name was Edith. She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member, not without difficulty, and I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop. 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. She bent over the couch, because of her rheumatism, and in I went from behind. It was the only position she could bear, because of her lumbago. It seemed all right to me, for I had seen dogs, and I was astonished when she confided that you could go about it differently. I wonder what she meant exactly. Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn't tell you. But is it true love, in the rectum? That's what bothers me sometimes. Have I never known true love, after all? She too was an eminently flat woman and she moved with short stiff steps, leaning on an ebony stick. Perhaps she too was a man, yet another of them. But in that case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed. Perhaps she held hers tight in her hand, on purpose to avoid it. She favoured voluminous tempestuous shifts and petticoats and other undergarments whose names I forget. They welled up all frothing and swishing and then, congress achieved, broke over us in slow cascades. And all I could see was her taut yellow nape which every now and then I set my teeth in, forgetting I had none, such is the power of instinct. We met in a rubbish dump, unlike any other, and yet they are all alike, rubbish dumps. I don't know what she was doing there. I was limply poking about in the garbage saying probably, for at that age I must still have been capable of general ideas, This is life. She had no time to lose, I had nothing to lose, I would have made love with a goat, to know what love was. She had a dainty flat, no, not dainty, it made you want to lie down in a corner and never get up again. I liked it. It was full of dainty furniture, under our desperate strokes the couch moved forward on its castors, the whole place fell about our ears, it was pandemonium. Our commerce was not without tenderness, with trembling hands she cut my toe-nails and I rubbed her rump with winter cream. This idyll was of short duration. Poor Edith, I hastened her end perhaps. Anyway it was she who started it, in the rubbish dump, when she laid her hand upon my fly. More precisely, I was bent double over a heap of muck, in the hope of finding something to disgust me for ever with eating, when she, undertaking me from behind, thrust her stick between my legs and began to titillate my privates. She gave me money after each session, to me who would have consented to know love, and probe it to the bottom, without charge. But she was an idealist. I would have preferred it seems to me an orifice less arid and roomy, that would have given me a higher opinion of love it seems to me. However. Twixt finger and thumb tis heaven in comparison. But love is no doubt above such contingencies. And not when you are comfortable, but when your frantic member casts about for a rubbing-place, and the unction of a little mucous membrane, and meeting with none does not beat in retreat, but retains its tumefaction, it is then no doubt that true love comes to pass, and wings away, high above the tight fit and the loose.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“From Beckett's "The Unnamable":

"They love each other, marry, in order to love each other better, more conveniently, he goes off to the wars, he dies at the wars, she weeps, with emotion, at having loved him, at having lost him, yep, marries again, in order to love again..., more conveniently again, they love each other, you love as many times as necessary, as necessary in order to be happy, he comes back, the other comes back, from the wars, he didn't die at the wars after all, she goes to the station, to meet him, he dies in the train, of emotion, at the thought of seeing her again, having her again, she weeps, weeps again, with emotion again, at having lost him again, yep, goes back to the house, he's dead, the other is dead, the mother-in-law takes him down, he hanged himself, with emotion, at the thought of losing her, she weeps, weeps louder, at having loved him, at having lost him, there's a story for you, that was to teach me the nature of emotion, that's called emotion, what emotion can do, given favourable conditions, what love can do, well well, so that's emotion, that's love, and trains, and the nature of trains, and the meaning of...”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“Let them be gone now, them and all the others, those I have used and those I have not used, give me back the pains I lent them and vanish, from my life, my memory, my terrors and shames. There, now there is no one here but me, no one wheels about me, no one comes toward me, no one has ever met anyone before my eyes, these creatures have never been, only I and this black void have ever been.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“It is the role of objects to restore silence”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity.”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“In other words, or perhaps another thing, whatever I said it was never enough and always too much. Yes,”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“I thought much about myself. That is to say I often took a quick look at myself, closed my eyes, forgot, began again.”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“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.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“Yes it sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger. Then I see the sky different from what it is and the earth too takes on false colours. It looks like rest, it is not, I vanish happy in that alien light, which must have once been mine, I am willing to believe it, then the anguish of return, I won’t say where, I can’t, to absence perhaps, you must return, that’s all I know, it’s misery to stay, misery to go.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“And I was wondering how to depart without self-loathing or sadness, or with as little as possible, when a kind of immense sigh all around me announced it was not I who was departing, but the flock.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“Yes it sometimes happens and will sometimes happen again that I forget who I am and strut before my eyes, like a stranger. Then I see the sky different from what it is and the earth too takes on false colours. It looks like rest, it is not, I vanish happy in that alien light, which must have once been mine, I am willing to believe it, then the anguish of return, I won’t say where, I can’t, to absence perhaps, you must return, that’s all I know, it’s misery to stay, misery to go. The”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“To know you can do better next time, unrecognizably better, and that there is no next time, and that it is a blessing there is not, there is a thought to be going on with.”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“You think you are simply resting, the better to act when the time comes, or for no reason, and you soon find yourself powerless ever to do anything again.”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“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.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“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. To”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“But now he knows these hills, that is to say he knows them better, and if ever again he sees them from afar it will be I think with other eyes, and not only that but the within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath, all that too quite differently disposed.”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“All roads were right for me, a wrong road was an event, for me.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“In other words, or perhaps another thing, whatever I said it was never enough and always too much.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“That movements of an extreme complexity were taking place seemed certain, and yet what a simple thing it seemed, that vast yellow light sailing slowly behind my bars and which little by little the dense wall devoured, and finally eclipsed. And now its tranquil course was written on the walls, a radiance scored with shadow, then a brief quivering of leaves, if they were leaves, then that too went out, leaving me in the dark. How”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“But all is forgotten and I have done nothing, unless what I am doing now is something, and nothing could give me greater satisfaction.”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“Is there then no hope? Good gracious, no, heavens, what an idea! Just a faint one perhaps, but which will never serve. But one forgets.”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“Does it really matter which hand is employed to absterge the podex?”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“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.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable

“All roads were right for me, a wrong road was an event, for me. But”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

“I too, weary of pleading an incomprehensible cause, at six and eight the thousand flowers of rhetoric, let myself drop among the contumacious, nice image that, telescoping space, it must be the Pulitzer Prize, they want to bore me to sleep, at long range, for fear I might defend myself, they want to catch me alive, so as to be able to kill me, thus I shall have lived, they think I’m alive, what a business, were there but a cadaver it would smack of body-snatching, not in a womb either, the slut has yet to menstruate capable of whelping me, that should singularly narrow the field of research, a sperm dying, of cold, in the sheets, feebly wagging its little tail, perhaps I’m a drying sperm, in the sheets of an innocent boy, even that takes time, no stone must be left unturned, one mustn’t be afraid of making a howler, how can one know it is one before it’s made, and one it most certainly is, now that it’s irrevocable, for the good reason, here’s another, here comes another, unless it escapes them in time, what a hope, the bright boy is there, for the excellent reason that counts as living too, counts as murder, it’s notorious, ah you can’t deny it, some people are lucky, born of a wet dream and dead before morning, I must say I’m tempted, no, the testis has yet to descend that would want any truck with me, it’s mutual, another gleam down the drain.”
― Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable