I am currently reading Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution by Pascale Casanova, introduced by Terry Eagleton

Beckett has always been a favorite of mine – for economy, humor, profundity, examination and exploration.  The following exemplify elements of this – quotations from simply the Introduction (by Eagleton) of this study…

“His work, in short, presents us with the scandal of a literature which no longer depends on a philosophy of the subject”

“every sentence of his writing keeps faith with our sense of powerlessness”

“nothing is quite as real as nothing”

“sublimity includes that which is barely visible as well as the immense and immeasurable, since both are equally ungraspable”

“there is no more truly historical phenomenon in art than form – which is quite as much saturated in social signification as so-called content”

Beckett presents “questions addressed by texts to themselves, queries about their own procedures and conditions of possibility”

“clear-eyed attempts at an exact formulation of the inarticulable…the extreme scrupulousness with which it sculpts the void”

“writing itself becomes for Beckett the very signifier of the failure which so gripped his imagination”

“places the very impediment to writing at the center of his writing, transforming the question of failure into the very form of his art, telling incessantly of the failure to tell”

Thanks Samuel.