James Joyce Quotes

I am proud to be an emotionalist.

British Beatitudes! ... Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops.

Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.

In woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation.

His eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.

A certain pride, a certain awe, withheld him from offering to God even one prayer at night, though he knew it was in God's power to take away his life while he slept and hurl his soul hellward ere he could beg for mercy.

Jesus was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.

I'll tickle his catastrophe.

And Jesus was a Jew too. Your god. He was a Jew like me. And so was his father.

Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.

My heart is quite calm now. I will go back.

By his monstrous way of life he seemed to have put himself beyond the limits of reality. Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard it in an echo of the infuriated cries within him.

In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life--the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet isintense--the life of Blake or of Dante--taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.

Time is, time was, but time shall be no more.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: ----Introibo ad altare Dei.

Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.

The end he had been born to serve yet did not see had led him to escape by an unseen path and now it beckoned to him once more and a new adventure was about to be opened to him.

There's no police like Holmes.

Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.

That ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.

Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and, when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.

A woman loses a charm with every pin she takes out.

Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.

What? Corpus. Body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin. Stupifies them first. Hospice for the dying. They don't seem to chew it; only swallow it down.

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.

We were always loyal to lost causes...Success for us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. ~ Professor MacHugh

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

As you are now so once were we.

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying: — That is God. Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee! — What? Mr Deasy asked. — A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.

Terence O'Ryan heard him and straightway brought him a crystal cup full of the foaming ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of deathless Leda. For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat.

Gentle lady, do not sing Sad songs about the end of love; Lay aside sadness and sing How love that passes is enough. Sing about the long deep sleep Of lovers that are dead, and how In the grave all love shall sleep: Love is aweary now.

(...) You cruel creature, little mite of a thing with a heart the size of a fullstop.

A man's errors are his portals of discovery.

Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more. She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she?

He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.

Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself: A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

I am damnably sick of Italy, Italian and Italians, outrageously, illogically sick.... I hate to think that Italians ever did anything in the way of art.... What did they do but illustrate a page or so of the New Testament! They themselves think they have a monopoly in the line. I am dead tired of their bello and bellezza.

What did it avail to pray when he knew his soul lusted after its own destruction?

Sentimentality is unearned emotion.