Malone Dies Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Malone Dies. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Nothing is more real than nothing.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
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)
let us say before i go any further, that i forgive nobody. i wish them all an atrocious life in the fires of icy hell and in the execrable generations to come.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
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.
Samuel Beckett (Molloy)
إني لا أغفر لأحد . وأتمنى للجميع حياة آثمة ، ثم نار جهنم وصقيعها . حتى يخرج اسم شريف من الأجيال اللعينة.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
بجدية كافحت لأكون جاداً أكثر ، أن أعيش وأبدع . ولكن عند كل محاوله جديدة أفقد عقلي ، أهرب إلى ظلالي كما يهرب الفرد إلى المعبد .
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
أرى الحياة دون أن أعرف ما هي ، حاولت أن أعيش دون أن أعرف ما أفعله أو أحاول أن أفعله ..
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
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.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
لو استطعت استخدام جسدي لألقيت به من النافذه ، معرفتي بعجزي هي التي تشجعني على مثل هذا التفكير .
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
I have spoken softly, gone my ways softly, all my days, as behoves one who has nothing to say, nowhere to go, and so nothing to gain by being seen or heard.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
: هذا النوع من الأغراء لا أريده الآن . إن حاجتي لجمال الحياة قد انتهت . واستطيع أن أموت اليوم إذا رغبت بمجرد مجهود صغير .
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
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)
ماذا علي أن أفعل؟ أرقب النافذه ،أطلق العنان لآلامي ، لعجزي،أغص،واسقط،أنهض،وأغص، وأفترض ،وأنكر، أؤكد وأغرق .أغادر نفسي بسرور أقل .
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
أستطيع أن أميز بين الأصوات الخارجية.أوراق الشجر،تأوه الجذوع.الأغصان،حتى الأعشاب،كل شجرة لها صيحتها الخاصة،ولا تتشابه شجرتان همسهما.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
في صغري كان الكبار يبعثون في نفسي التساؤل والرهبة ، وما يدهشني الآن هم الأطفال يبكون ويصرخون .
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
Malone: Me father died of starvation in Ireland in the black 47. Maybe you've heard of it. Violet: The Famine? Malone: No, the starvation. When a country is full o food, and exporting it, there can be no famine.
George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman)
Live and invent. I have tried. I must have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is to live. No matter. I have tried. [...] I say living without knowing what it is. I tried to live without knowing what I was trying. Perhaps I have lived afterall, without knowing.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
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)
I could die today, if I wished, merely by making a little effort, if I could wish, if I could make an effort. But it is just as well to let myself die, quietly, without rushing things. Something must have changed. I will not weigh upon the balance any more, one way or the other.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
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 shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
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)
You can tell you're reading a really good book when you forget all about everything else and know you'll die if you get to at least the end of the chapter
Christopher Paul Curtis (The Mighty Miss Malone)
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)
: أحس بالظلام القديم يتجمع ، والعزلة تستعد ، فيهما أعرف ذاتي ، ونداء المجهول النبيل ، شديد الجبن ، يجب أن أتجنب النظر إلى ذاتي .
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
في الظلام . صرير السرير جزء من حياتي لا أحب أن يختفي .
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
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)
Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything.
Samuel Beckett (Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable)
لأتحدث عن الفترة أصبحت فيها سائلاً وتحولت إلى شيء كالوّحل . وبلا حزن مفرط لقد اعتدت على تحسس الأشياء وأنا جامد الحركة .
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
الكلمات والصور تعربد مسرعة في رأسي وتندمج فتختلط مع أنفاسي.وحين أخرج أنفاسي تملأ الغرفة بضجيجها،مع إنه صدري لا يتحرك إلا كطفل نائم.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
سأفتح عيني وأنظر إلى كومة ممتلكاتي الصغيرة ، وألقي الأوامر المعتادة إلى جسدي،وأنا أعرف لن يطيع ، أتحول إلى روحي المتجهه إلى الهلاك.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
You may say it is all in my head, and indeed sometimes it seems to me I am in a head and that these eight, no, six, these six planes that enclose me are of solid bone. But thence to conclude the head is mine, no, never.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
: ذاكرتي ضعيفة،ينزلق إصبعي الصغير أمام قلمي الرصاص عبر الصفحة يحذرني،يسقط على الحافة،منبئاً نهاية السطر قد اقتربت ،لكن في اتجاه آخر.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
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)
كل كارثة تهددني ، بعد حمام الوحل سأكون أقدر على الصبر على عالم ما لم يلوثه وجودي .
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
I shall not speak of my sufferings. Cowering deep down among them I feel nothing. It is there I die, unbeknown to my stupid flesh. That which is seen, that which cries and writhes, my witless remains. Somewhere in the turmoil thought struggles on, it too wide of the mark. It too seeks me, as it always has, where I am not to be found.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
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)
: وقتي محدود، جسدي لم يتخذ قراره،فالحيوات الحقيقية لا تتسامح مع هذا البطء،الشيطان يتربص مثل المكروب في البروستاتا.سيطلق الخراب كتائبه
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
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)
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)
The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.
Steve Berry (The Venetian Betrayal (Cotton Malone, #3))
Love is one of the most powerful motivations there is. Love, hate, greed: the holy trinity of murder.
Erica Spindler (Watch Me Die (Stacy Killian, #4; The Malones, #5))
Misfortunes, blessings, I have no time to pick my words, I am in a hurry to be done. And yet no, I am in no hurry.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
Life is trying to kill us,” she says. Life, Malone thinks, is trying to kill everyone. And it always succeeds. Sometimes before you die.
Don Winslow (The Force)
A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
But what matter whether I was born or not, have lived or not, am dead or merely dying, I shall go on doing as I have always done, not knowing what it is I do, nor who I am, nor where I am, nor if I am. Yes, a little creature, I shall try and make a little creature, to hold in my arms, a little creature in my image, no matter what I say. And seeing what a poor thing I have made, or how like myself, I shall eat it. Then be alone a long time, unhappy, not knowing what my prayer should be nor to whom.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
Oh yeah, by the way, baby. I'm your husband. You know, the one that died? The one that wouldn't come back to you for six fucking years. Yeah, she'd accept that easily enough. Bullshit.
Lora Leigh (Wild Card (Elite Ops, #1))
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)
~I gripped the knife even tighter. Far off in the distance, I could still hear them speaking, but only one thing was clear in my mind: Trevor, my father, was going to die. From that moment on, I was Chloe Kallistrate, a vampire hunter.~
Jennifer Malone Wright (The Vampire Hunter's Daughter (The Vampire Hunter's Daughter #1))
Does it really matter which hand is employed to absterge the podex?
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)
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)
So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.
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.
Samuel Beckett (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)
I can't compete with a ghost or a perfect memory...I'm just a man...Flesh and blood. If you decide that's what you want, you know where to find me...
Erica Spindler (Watch Me Die (Stacy Killian, #4; The Malones, #5))
The turmoil of the day freezes in a thousand absurd postures.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
Her mind was a press of formless questions, mingling and crumbling limply away.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
And agreement only comes a little later, with the forgetting.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
A little darkness, in itself, at the time, is nothing. You think no more about it and you go on. But I know what darkness is, it accumulates, thickens, then suddenly bursts and drowns everything.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
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)
The search for myself is ended. I am buried in the world, I knew I would find my place there one day, the old world cloisters me, victorious. I am happy, I knew I would be happy one day. But I am not wise. For the wise thing now would be to let go, at this instant of happiness. And what do I do? I go back again to the light, to the fields I so longed to love, to the sky all astir with little white clouds as white and light as snowflakes, to the life I could never manage, through my own fault perhaps, through pride, or pettiness, but I don't think so.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
If you don’t teach that dog to sit, she’s going to die!” said the tall bearded man in blue jeans standing next to me. He pointed at the ground, bent down to get in Belvy’s face, and bellowed at her, “SIT!!” To my astonishment, Belvy sat. She didn’t just sit, she pounded her butt into the pavement, and looked up at the man wagging her tail. The man was in my face now. “See? It’s not mean, it’s clear.” The light changed, and the man strode across the street, leaving me with words to live by.
Kim Malone Scott (Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity)
Yes, I know they are words, there was a time I didn’t, as I still don’t know if they are mine.
Samuel Beckett (Three Novels: 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)
The little cloud drifting before their glorious sun will darken the earth as long as I please.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
you don't feel a mouth on you, you don't feel your mouth any more, no need of a mouth, the words are everywhere, inside me, outside me...
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
I put b in bitch, baby.
Erica Spindler (Watch Me Die (Stacy Killian, #4; The Malones, #5))
The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
Lousse tried to make him say, Pretty Polly! I think it was too late. He listened, his head on one side, pondered, then said, Fuck the son of a bitch. It was clear he was doing his best.
Samuel Beckett (Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)
In a word there seems to be the light of the outer world, of those who know the sun and moon emerge at such an hour and such another plunge again below the surface, and who rely on this, and who know that clouds are always to be expected but sooner or later always pass away, and mine. But mine too has its alterations, I will not deny it, its dusks and dawns, but that is what I say, for I too must have lived, once, out there, and there is no recovering from that.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
Yes, now my mind is easy, I know the game is won, I lost them all till now, but it's the last that counts. A very fine achievement I must say, or rather would, if I did not fear to contradict myself. Fear to contradict myself! If this continues it is myself I shall lose and the thousand ways that lead there. And I shall resemble the wretches famed in fable, crushed beneath the weight of their wish come true. And I even feel a strange desire come over me, the desire to know what I am doing, and why. So I near the goal I set myself in my young days and which prevented me from living. And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another. Very pretty.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
All is ready. Except me. I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth to into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence. Favourable presentation I trust. My head will be the last to die. Haul in your hands. I can't. The render rent. My story ended I'll be living yet. Promising lag. That is the end of me. I shall say I no more.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
never noticed you were waiting alone, that's the show, waiting alone, in the restless air, for it to begin, for something to begin, for there to be something else but you, for the power to rise, the courage to leave, you try and be reasonable, perhaps you are blind, probably deaf, the show is over,...
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
Hell itself, although eternal, dates from the revolt of Lucifer. It is therefore permissible, in the light of this distant analogy, to think of myself as being here for ever, but not as having been here for ever.
Samuel Beckett (Three Novels: 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)
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)
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)
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)
Narcissists Cheat. If they have been caught in other lies, what makes you believe their cheating lies? What is your die hard boundary on cheating? Once? Twice? Remember your children are watching and learning how they should be treated. Stand up for them.
Tracy Malone
This version of the facts having been restored, it only remains to say it is no better than the other and no less incompatible with the kind of creature I might just conceivably have been if they had known how to take me. So let us consider now what really occurred.
Samuel Beckett (Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)
I think it's in Malone Dies that Beckett's creature is in a kind of prison or hospital. As I recall, he is visited twice a day, slop brought in and slop taken out. He has a stub of a pencil, a bit of paper. And he asks questions, ten, sven, I don't remember, "Why am I here?" "What day is it?" The last one, no. 10 maybe, says "Number your answers." This is not just desperation and clinging to something called 'reason'--by his fingertips--that is humanity, shit-smeared, hopeless, and mad humanity--in the face of all denial. Our work is about that. My work.
Gerald Stern
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)
Weary with my weariness, white last moon, sole regret, not even. To be dead, before her, on her, with her, and turn, dead on dead, about poor mankind, and never have to die anymore, from among the living. Not even, not even that. My moon was here below, far below, the little I was able to desire. And one day, soon, soon, one earthlit night, beneath the earth, a dying being will say, like me, in the earthlight, Not even, not even that, and die, without having been able to find regret.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
Then he was sorry he had not learnt the art of thinking, beginning by folding back the second and third fingers the better to put the index on the subject and the little finger on the verb, in the way his teacher had shown him, and sorry he could make no meaning of the babel, raging in his head, the doubts, desires, imaginings and dreads.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
And at half past nine in the evening at that restaurant table in Portugal,” Mary continued, “someone gave me a piece of marzipan and it all came back. And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without ever feeling that again? I thought: I want to go to China. It’s full of treasures and strangeness and mystery and joy. I thought, Will anyone be better off if I go straight back to the hotel and say my prayers and confess to the priest and promise never to fall into temptation again? Will anyone be the better for making me miserable? “And the answer came back—no. No one will. There’s no one to fret, no one to condemn, no one to bless me for being a good girl, no one to punish me for being wicked. Heaven was empty. I didn’t know whether God had died, or whether there never had been a God at all. Either way I felt free and lonely and I didn’t know whether I was happy or unhappy, but something very strange had happened. And all that huge change came about as I had the marzipan in my mouth, before I’d even swallowed it. A taste—a memory—a landslide...
Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, #3))
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.
Samuel Beckett (Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable)
I shall not speak of my sufferings. Cowering deep down among them I feel nothing. It is there I die, unbeknown to my stupid flesh. That which is seen, that which cries and writhes, my witless remains. Somewhere in this turmoil thought struggles on, it too wide of the mark. It too seeks me, as it always has, where I am not to be found. It too cannot be quiet. On others let it wreak its dying rage, and leave me in peace.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything. The horror-worn eyes linger abject on all they have beseeched so long, in a last prayer, the true prayer at last, the one that asks for nothing. And it is then a little breath of fulfilment revives the dead longings and a murmur is born in the silent world, reproaching you affectionately with having despaired too late. The last word in the way of a viaticum.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
What to do now, what shall I do now, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later. Generally speaking. There must be other shifts. Otherwise it would be quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless. I should mention before going any further that I say aporia without knowing what it means. Can one be ephectic otherwise than unawares? I don't know.
Samuel Beckett (Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable)
Lasse de ma lassitude, blanche lune dernière, seul regret, même pas. Être mort, avant elle, sur elle, avec elle, et tourner, mort sur morte, autour des pauvres hommes, et n’avoir plus jamais à mourir, d’entre les mourants. Même pas, même pas ça. Ma lune fut ici-bas, ici bien bas, le peu que j’aie su désirer. Et un jour, bientôt, une nuit de terre, bientôt, sous la terre, un mourant dira, comme moi, au clair de terre, Même pas, même pas ça, et mourra, sans avoir pu trouver un regret.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
the Times says there's a heroin epidemic, Malone thinks, which is only an epidemic of course because now white people are dying. Whites started to get opium-based pills from their physicians: oxycodone, vicodin... But, it was expensive and doctors were reluctant to prescribe too much for exactly the fear of addiction. So the white folks went to the open market and the pills became a street drug. It was all very nice and civilized until the Sinoloa cartel down in Mexico made a corporate decision that it could undersell the big American pharmaceutical companies by raising production of its heroin thereby reducing price. As an incentive, they also increased its potency. The addicted white Americans found that Mexican ... heroin was cheaper and stronger than the pills, and started shooting it into their veins and overdosing. Malone literally saw it happening. He and his team busted more bridge-and-tunnel junkies, suburban housewives and upper Eastside madonnas than they could count....
Don Winslow (The Force)
And perhaps there is none, no morrow anymore, for one who has waited so long for it in vain. And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks all look alike. Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fullness of the great deep and unchanging calm. But at long intervals they close, with the gentle suddenness of flesh that tightens, often without anger, and closes on itself.
Samuel Beckett (Malone Dies)
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)