James Joyce Quotes

There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

He passes, struck by the stare of truculent Wellington but in the convex mirror grin unstruck the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy.

Shut your eyes and see.

O cold ! O shivery ! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet. Let me off this once.

He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life

Time's ruins build eternity's mansions.

You get a decent do at the Brazen Head

The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.

The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

Thought is the thought of thought.

One of the things I could never get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature.

I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.

It was cold autumn weather, but in spite of the cold they wandered up and down the roads of the Park for nearly three hours. They agreed to break off their intercourse; every bond, he said, is a bond to sorrow.

While you have a thing it can be taken from you…..but when you give it, you have given it. no robber can take it from you. It is yours then forever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.

Oh Ireland my first and only love Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!

In the particular is contained the universal.

Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.

What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?

The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. Paintings of Moreau are paintings of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom; Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.

I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.

Wipe your glosses with what you know.

There's many a true word spoken in jest.

Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

There's no friends like the old friends.

Thanks be to God we lived so long and did so much good.

Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.

All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.

My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.

The light music of whiskey falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.

Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.

Love, yes. Word known to all men.

He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.

Tenors get women by the score.

Wipe your glasses with what you know.

I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

I have left my book, I have left my room, For I heard you singing Through the gloom.

Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.

What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.

I see the regions of snow and ice, I see the sharp-eyed Samoiede and the Finn, I see the seal-seeker in his boat poising his lance, I see the Siberian on his slight-built sledge drawn by dogs, I see the porpoise-hunters, I see the whale-crews of the south Pacific and the north Atlantic, I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys of Switzerland - I mark the long winters and the isolation.