Samuel Beckett
Digital Manuscript Project
Molloy

MS-WU-MSS008-3-50-1

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Segment 1

[0591] growing, the entrails ec [place = ] mptying, all the morticians are dead.
[0592] Someone has drawn the blinds, you perhaps. [0593] Not the faintest sound.
[0594] Where are the famous flies? [0595] Yes, there is no denying it, any longer,
it is not you who are dead, but all the others.
[0596] So you get up and
go to your mother, who thinks she is alive.
[0597] That's my impression.
[0598] But now I'm going to [place = supralinear] []I shall have to get [place = supralinear] myself out of this ditch. [0599] How willingly [place = supralinear] joyfully
I would vanish there, sinking deeper and deeper under the rains.

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Segment 2

[0600] No doubt I'll come back some day, here, or to a similar slough,
I [place = supralinear] []am can trust my feet for that, as no doubt some day I'll meet again the
sergeant and his merry men.
[0601] And if, too changed to know it is they,
I do not say it is they, do not be deceived [place = supralinear] []make no mistake, it will be they, though
changed.
[0602] For to define [place = supralinear] conjure up [place = supralinear] contrive a being, a place, I nearly said an hour,
but I don't want to hurt anybody's [place = supralinear] []would not hurt anyone's feelings, and then to use them
no more, that would be, how shall I say, I don't know.

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Segment 3

[0603] Not to want
to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say
what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly
ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of
composition.
[0604] That night was not like the other night, if it had
been I would have known.

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Segment 4

[0605] For when I try and think of that night,
on the canal-bank, I find nothing, no night properly speaking,
nothing but Molloy in the ditch, and perfect silence, and behind
my closed lids the little night and its little lights, faint at
first, then flaming and extinguished, now ravening, now fed, as
fire by filth and martyrs.

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Segment 5

[0606] I sax [place = ] y that night, but there was more
than one perhaps.
[0607] The lie, the lie, to lying thought. [0608] But I
find the morning, a morning, and the sun already high, and the
little sleep I had then, according to my custom, and space with

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