James Joyce Quotes

She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.

The pleasures of love lasts but a fleeting but the pledges of life outlusts a lieftime.

I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.

Ineluctable modality of the visible; at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read.

Fall if you will, but rise you must.

History is that nightmare from which there is no awakening.

Children must be educated by love, not punishment.

Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are... Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead.

Save the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O.

Away! Away! The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth... Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.

No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse.

It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness.

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flown at it to hold it back from flight.

Nations have their ego, just like individuals.

If the Irish programme did not insist on the Irish language I suppose I could call myself a nationalist. As it is, I am content torecognize myself an exile: and, prophetically, a repudiated one.

Have read little and understood less.

You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

(...) The new nine muses, Commerce, Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Specch, Plural Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments, Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.

Under cover of her silence he pressed her arm closely to his side; and, as they stood at the hotel door, he felt that they had escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure.

Always see a fellows weak point in his wife.

No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.

I could call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play.

For the years, he felt, had not quenched his soul, or hers.

The swift December dusk had come tumbling clownishly after its dull day and, as he stared through the dull square of the window of the schoolroom, he felt his belly crave for its food. He hoped there would be stew for dinner, turnips and carrots and bruised potatoes and fat mutton pieces to be ladled out in thick peppered flourfattened sauce. Stuff it into you, his belly counselled him.

I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.

God made food; the devil the cooks.

He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.

If there is any difficulty in what I write, it is because of the material I use. The thought is always simple.

if it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes this thusness.

What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.

[...] a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk

His heart danced upon her movement like a cork upon a tide.

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.

I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.

People trample over flowers, yet only to embrace a cactus.

The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue.

Signatures of all things I am here to read.

You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out.

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

When I die Dublin will be written on my heart.

When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.