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Some Quotations from Dramatic
Works of Beckett
| WAITING FOR GODOT(1956; Faber edns.), ESTRAGON: ‘Nothing to be done.’ (p.9.) Vladimir: ‘You’d be nothing more than a little heap of bones … .’ (p.9.) ESTRAGON: ‘Nothing ... there’s nothing to show.’ (p.11.) VLADIMIR: ‘Nothing to be done.’ (p.11.) VLADIMIR: ‘Nothing is certain when you’re about.’ (p.14.) ESTRAGON: ‘Nothing to be done. Like to finish it [the carrot]?’ (p.21.) ESTRAGON: ‘Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!’ (p.41.) … . ACT II: ESTRAGON: ‘Yes, I remember, yesterday evening we spent blathering about nothing in particular. That’s been going on now for half a century.’ (p.66.) VLADIMIR: ‘All I know is that the hours are long, under these conditions, and constrain us to beguile them with proceedings which - how shal I say - which may at first sight seem reasonable, until they become a habit. You may say it is to prevent our reason from foundering. No doubt. But has it not long been straying in the night without end of the abyssal depths? That’s what I sometimes wonder. You follow my reasoning?’ (p.80.) VLADIMIR: ‘We wait. We are bored. 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! In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!’ (p.81.) POZZO: ‘Have you not done tormenting me with our accursed time? It’s abominable. When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day like any other day, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we’ll die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’ (p.89.) VLADIMIR: ‘Was I sleeping, which the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? He’ll [i.e., Estragon] know nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows he received and I’ll give him a carrrot. Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts [90] 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. I can’t go on! What have I said?’ (pp.90-91.) |
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| ENDGAME(Faber 1957, & edns.), No more nature! (p.16). ‘Something is taking its course’ (p.17, 26). ‘There’s something dripping in my head’ (p.19). ‘nothing is funnier than unhappiness’ (p.20). ‘why this farce, day after day?’ (p.26). ‘to think perhaps it won’t all have been for nothing!’(p.27). ‘laying, lying’ (p.27). ‘time for my painkiller’ (p.28). ‘Ah, the old questions … there’s nothing like them’ (p.29). ‘a rare thing not to have been bonny - once’ (p.31). ‘I use the words you taught me’ (p.32). ‘do you not think this has gone on long enough?’ (p.33). Hamm: ‘You’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!’ (p.37; 44). ‘... whining for bread for his brat’ (p.40). Clov: ‘There’s one thing I’ll never understand .. why I always obey you’ (p.48). ‘Did you never hear an aside before .. I’m warming up for my last soliloquy’ (p.49). ‘we’ve come to the end’ (p.50). ‘you must learn to suffer better than that if you want them to weary of punising you - one day.’ (p.51). ‘its we who are obliged to each other.’ (p.51). Old endgame lost of old, play and loose and have done with losing.’ (p.51). |
| KRAPP’S LAST TAPE (1959), ‘I asked her to look at me and after a few moments … after a few moments she did. […] We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! … 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.’ (Krapp’s Last Tape, p.18.). ‘Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision at last. This I fancy is what I have chiefly to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for that miracle [...] [hesitates] .. for the fire that set it alight. [...&c.; q.p.]’. |
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| ALL THAT FALL: A Text for Radio (1957) [set at Boghill station, with Mrs Maddy Rooney and Dan Rooney. Jerry, others]. |
Mr. Rooney, ‘[...] Do you know, Maddy, sometimes one would think you were struggling with a dead language’. Mrs Rooney, ‘Yes, indeed, Dan, I know full well what you mean, I often have the feeling, it is unspeakably excruciating.’ Mr Rooney, ‘I confess I have it sometimes myself, when I happen to overhear what I am saying.’ Mrs Rooney’, ‘Well you know, it will be dead in time, just like our own poor dead Gaelic, there is that to be said.’ (Urgent baa.) Mr Rooney (startled), ‘Good God!’ Mrs Rooney, ‘Oh, the pretty little woolly lamb, crying to suck its mother! Theirs has not changed, since Arcady.’ (p.35.) Mrs. Rooney [recounting the psychiatrist’s lecture], ‘The trouble with her was she was never really born!’ (p.37.) FURTHER, Mrs Rooney remembers ‘one of those mid doctors, I forget what you call them […] telling us the story of a little girl, very strange and unhappy in her ways, and how he treated her unsuccessfully over a period of years and was finally obliged to give up the case. He could find nothing wrong with her, he said. The only thing wrong with her as far as he could see was that she was dying. And she did in fact die shortly after he had washed his hands of her.’ […] it was just something he said, and the way he said it, that have haunted me ever since […]When he had done with the little girl he stood there motionless for some time, quite, quite two minutes, I should say, looking down at his table. Then he suddenly raised his head and explained, as if he had had a revelation, “The trouble with her was that she had never been really born!”.’ [quoted in Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, 1996, p.221.)
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| HAPPY DAYS |
Winnie, ‘Ah yes, so little to say, so little to do, and the fear so great, certain days, of finding oneself … left, with hours still to run, before the bell for sleep, and nothing more to say, nothing more to do, that the days go by, certain days go by, quite by, the bell goes, and little or nothing said, little or nothing done.’ (Happy Days, in Collected Plays, p.27); ‘Yes, something seems to have occurred, somehing has seemed to occur, and nothing has occurred, nothing at all, you are quite right, Willie.’ (Happy Days, ibid., p.154).
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ENG507C2 - University of Ulster - 2003
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