James Joyce Quotes

A dim antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud against her disloyalty: and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.

You don't know yet what money is. Money is power, when you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put money in thy purse.

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

I think of you so often you have no idea.

A wave of yet more tender joy escaped from his heart, and went coursing in warm flood along his arteries. Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of, or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory..

I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due installments plans. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak a different vernacular, so to speak.

King Solomon says in Proverbs that there is nothing new under the sun.

All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her.

We who live under heaven, we of the clovery kindgom, we middlesins people have often watched the sky overreaching the land.

If we could only live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives' spits.

What incensed him the most was the blatant jokes of the ones that passed it all off as a jest, pretending to understand everything and in reality not knowing their own minds.

Well, you know or don't you kennet or haven't I told you every
telling has a taling and that's the he and the she of it.

First you must take your degree. Set that before you as your first aim. Then, little by little, you will see your way. I mean in every sense, your way in life and in thinking.

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

The sad quiet grey-blue glow of the dying day came through the window and the open door, covering over and allaying quietly a sudden instinct of remorse in Stephen's heart.

Of course, Mr B. proceeded to stipulate, you must look at both sides of the question. It is hard to lay down any hard and fast rules as to right and wrong but room for improvement all round there certainly is though every country, they say, our own distressful included, has the government it deserves. But with a little goodwill all round. It's all very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality. I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, in the next house so to speak.

Now patience; and remember patience is the great thing, and above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming out of patience.

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.

Wery weeny wight, plead for Morandmor! Notre Dame de la Ville, mercy of thy balmheartzyheat!

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once ...

The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a midden of man's ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel: isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human

That ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia.

Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible; beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. Aristotle's entire system of philosophy rests upon his book of psychology and that, I think, rests on his statement that the same attribute cannot at the same time and in the same connexion belong to and not belong to the same subject. The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension.

Some undefined sorrow was hidden in the hearts of the protagonists as they stood in silence beneath the leafless trees and when the moment of farewell had come the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both.

A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

The whores would be just coming out of their houses making ready for the night, yawning lazily after their sleep and settling the hairpins in their clusters of hair. He would pass by them calmly waiting for a sudden movement of his own will or a sudden call to his sinloving soul from their soft perfumed flesh.

And with that he took the bloody old towser by the scruff of the neck and by Jesus he near throttled him.

The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word ARREST. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

Slow eyes and parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going.

You ask me why I don't love you, but surely you must believe I am very fond of you and if to desire to possess a person wholly, to admire and honour that person deeply, and to seek to secure that person's happiness in every way is to "love" then perhaps my affection for you is a kind of love. I will tell you this that your soul seems to me to be the most beautiful and simple soul in the world and it may be because I am so conscious of this when I look at you that my love or affection for you loses much of its violence.

It's something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?

What proposal did Bloom, diambulist, father of Milly, somnambulist, make to Stephen, noctambulist?

Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.

Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.

For all their faults. I am passing out. O bitter ending! I'll slip away before they're up. They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me.

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?

When I die, Dublin will be written on my heart.

Love ... is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself

If you can put your five fingers throught it, it is a gate, if not a door.

Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for him who has walked in the right path.

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.

Why was he doubly irritated?
Because he had forgotten and because he remembered that he had reminded himself twice not to forget.

And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.

One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse. Cremation better. Priests dead against it. Devilling for the other firm. Wholesale burners and Dutch oven dealers. Time of the plague. Quicklime feverpits to eat them. Lethal chamber. Ashes to ashes. Or bury at sea. Where is that Parsee tower of silence? Eaten by birds. Earth, fire, water. Drowning they say is the pleasantest. See your whole life in a flash. But being brought back to life no. Can't bury in the air however. Out of a flying machine. Wonder

EPISODE 2 As we there are where are we are we there from tomtittot to teetootomtotalitarian. Tea tea too oo. With his broad and hairy face, to Ireland a disgrace. SIC. Whom will comes over. Who to caps ever. And howelse do we hook our hike to find that pint of porter place? Am shot, says the big-guard.

Ireland sober is Ireland stiff. Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me! Your prayers. I sonht zo! Madammangut!

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

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

Love between man and woman is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse, and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.

Early morning: set off at dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day's march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically.

Groangrousegurgling Toft's cumbersome whirligig turns slowly the room right roundabout the room.)

And whowasit youwasit propped the pot in the yard and whatinthe nameofsen lukeareyou rubbinthe sideofthe flureofthe lobbywith Shite! will you have a plateful? Tak.

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

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.

Broken Eggs will poursuive bitten Apples for where theirs is Will there's his Wall

Her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and

Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.

Stephen picks up on Armstrong's pier, and calls Kingstown pier "a disappointed bridge" (2.22). He's joking about the fact that Ireland wanted to be connected to continental Europe but ended up being extremely isolated.

The long eyelids beat and lift: a burning needleprick stings and quivers in the velvet iris.

- Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.
- I will take the risk, said Stephen.
- And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.

Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can't play it here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Culler broke a window in the Kildare street club with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more in their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M'Carthy took the floor. Heatwave. Won't last. Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.

It wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world's culture.

I am caught in this burning scene. Pan's hour, the faunal noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is far.

Desire's wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time.

Ask no questions and you'll hear no lies.

no more pain. wake no more. nobody owns

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then. Would you?

I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of the match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives

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

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

When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street.

Never back a woman you defend, never get quit of a friend on whom you depend, never make face to a foe till he's rife and never get stuck to another man's pfife.

Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.

His prayer, addressed neither to God nor saint, began with a shiver, as the chilly morning breeze crept through the chink of the carriage door to his feet, and ended in a trail of foolish words which he made to fit the insistent rhythm of the train; and silently, at intervals of four seconds, the telegraph-poles held the galloping notes of the music between punctual bars.

I feel more strongly with every recurring year that our country has no tradition which does it so much honour and which it should guard so jealously as that of its hospitality. It is a tradition that is unique as far as my experience goes (and I have visited not a few places abroad) among the modern nations. Some would say, perhaps, that with us it is rather a failing than anything to be boasted of. But granted even that, it is, to my mind, a princely failing, and one that I trust will long be cultivated among us. Of one thing, at least, I am sure. As long as this one roof shelters the good ladies aforesaid- and I wish from my heart it may do so for many and many a long year to come- the tradition of genuine warm-hearted courteous Irish hospitality, which our forefathers have handed down to us and which we must hand down to our descendants, is still alive among us.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

Oh rocks!' says Molly Bloom, drumming her fingers in impatience. 'Tell us in plain words.

Are you not weary of ardent ways, Lure of the fallen seraphim? Tell no more of enchanted days. Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze And you have had your will of him. Are you not weary of ardent ways? Above the flame the smoke of praise Goes up from ocean rim to rim. Tell no more of enchanted days. Our broken cries and mournful lays Rise in one eucharistic hymn. Are you not weary of ardent ways? While sacrificing hands upraise The chalice flowing to the brim. Tell no more of enchanted days. And still you hold our longing gaze With languorous look and lavish limb! Are you not weary of ardent ways? Tell no more of enchanted days.

Yes, it was her he was looking at, and there was meaning in his look. His eyes burned into her as though they would search her through and through, read her very soul.

Damn it, I can understand a fellow being hard up but what I can't understand is a fellow sponging. Couldn't he have some spark of manhood about him?

It could not be a wall but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything.

My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity - home, the recognised virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines

I will not say nothing. I will defend my church and my religion when it is insulted and spit on.

It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.

A nation is the same people living in the same place.

He is cured by faith who is sick of fate.

The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and 're-embody' it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist.

A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.

When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And he answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel.

And yet and yet! That strained look on her face! A gnawing sorrow is there all the time. Her very soul is in her eyes and she would give worlds to be in the privacy of her own familiar chamber where, giving way to tears, she could have a good cry and relieve her pentup feelings.
Though not too much because she knew how to cry nicely before the mirror. You are lovely, Gerty, it said.

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.

Ulysses He ... saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid flatong flower.

He remembered well, with the curious patient memory of the celibate, the first casual caresses her dress, her breath, her fingers had given him ... He remembered well her eyes, the touch of her hand and his delirium ...

Peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.

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

Over the bowls of memory where every hollow holds a hallow

I'll do him in, so help me fucking Christ! I'll wring the bastard fucker's bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

They mouth love's language. Gnash
The thirteen teeth
Your lean jaws grin with. Lash
Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.
Love's breath in you is stale, worded or sung,
As sour as cat's breath,
Harsh of tongue.

Beauty: it curves, curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires.