This post by Alison Nastasi originally appeared on Flavorwire on 4/13/14.
We’d like to wish avant-garde icon Samuel Beckett a happy birthday, but something tells us he’d take issue with that. Beckett’s words are tender blows to the heart — superbly morose, always acerbic, and unrelentingly pessimistic. The novelist and playwright had a lot to say about the absurdities of modern life and the tragicomic nature of human existence. Taking quotes from his prolific oeuvre and other sources, celebrate Beckett’s birthday by revisiting his thoughts on the boredom and suffering of being.
“The only sin is the sin of being born.”
“You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.”
“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
“I grow gnomic. It is the last phase.”
“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.”
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