I can't go on. I'll go on.

We traced this line directly to the closing passage of Samuel Beckett's *The Unnamable*, first published in French as *L'Innommable* (1953) and rendered into English by Beckett himself for the 1958 Grove Press edition of the trilogy. In the original text the words appear within a longer final sentence—"...you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on"—so the popular two-sentence form ("I can't go on. I'll go on.") is a lightly condensed and repunctuated extract rather than a verbatim quotation, but the wording and authorship are unmistakably Beckett's. A concordance to Beckett's trilogy confirms the phrase at *The Unnamable* p. 152, and the line is so identified with him that a Grove Press one-volume collection of his work is titled *I Can't Go On, I'll Go On*. We found no credible competing author and no evidence the line predates Beckett or originated with anyone else; its provenance is settled in literary scholarship. The only caveat is the cosmetic tidying of punctuation in the circulated version, which does not affect authorship. Because the words trace to a specific, named primary source authored by Beckett, this quote is verified.