James Joyce
poet, novelist, teacher, author, writer, journalist, literary critic, prose writer, librettist
Read on Wikipedia1882 – 1941
All Quotes by James Joyce
“I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”
“The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book — or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.”
“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.”
“If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.”
“The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.”
“My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire.”
“When I hear the word "stream" uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristram Shandy, not to mention the Agamemnon.”
“There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.”
“I laugh at it today, now that I have had all the good of it. Let the bridge blow up, provided I have got my troops across... Nonetheless, that book was a terrible risk. A transparent leaf separates it from madness.”
“I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.”
“[Robinson Crusoe] is the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty slave who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races. The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe: the manly independence; the unconscious cruelty; the persistence; the slow yet efficient intelligence; the sexual apathy; the practical, well-balanced religiousness; the calculating taciturnity.”
“Every night as I gazed up at the window I said to myself softly the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.”
“I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.”
“But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.”
“Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”
“She dealt with moral problems the way a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind.”
“He was not sure what idea he wished to express but the thought that a poetic moment had touched upon him took life within him like an infant hope. He stepped onward bravely.”
“He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen.”
“One of his sentences, written two months after his last interview with Mrs. Sinico, read: Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.”
“One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”
“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... (271)”
“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. (683)”
“Boor, bond of thy herd,Tonight stretch full by the fire!”
“Loveward above the glancing oar”
“Frail the white rose and frail areHer hands that gave”
“How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling,Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling,”
“The fragrant hair,Dusk of the air.”
“Around us fear, descendingDarkness of fear above”
“And mine a shielded heart for herWho gathers simples of the moon.”
“Vast wings above the lambent waters broodOf sullen day.”
“Seraphim,The lost hosts awaken”
“The sly reeds whisper to the nightA name — her name —”
“Your lean jaws grin with. LashYour itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.”
“Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish. (4.15-17)”
“But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus (12.32-33)”
“Humme the Cheapner, Esc, overseen as we thought him, yet worthy of the naym, came at this timecoloured place where we live in our paroqial fermament one tide on another (29.30)”
“in the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of the world (83.10-12)”
“the cluekey to a worldroom beyond the roomwhorld, for scarce one, or pathetically few of his dode canal sammenlivers cared seriously or for long to doubt with Kurt Iuld van Dijke (the gravitational pull perceived by certain fixed residents and the capture of uncertain comets chancedrifting through our system suggesting the authenticitatem of his aliquitudinis) he canonicity of his existence as a tesseract. Be still, O quick! Speak him dumb! Hush ye fronds of Ulma!”
“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!”
“I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear.”
“'Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry (115.36)”
“(Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed! Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many. Miscegenations on miscegenations. Tieckle.”
“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. Look, look, the dusk is growing!”
“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.”
“Can you nei do her, numb? asks Dolph, suspecting the answer know. Oikkont, ken you, ninny? asks Kev, expecting the answer guess. (286.25-27)”
“Quoint a quincidence! O.K. Omnius Kollidimus. As Ollover Krumwall sayed when he slepped ueber his grannyamother. Kangaroose feathers. Who in the name of thunder'd ever belevin you were that bolt?”
“Three quarks for Muster Mark! (383.1)”
“A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place, Is the Pen Mightier than the Sword? A Successful Career in the Civil Service.”
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
“We expect you are, honest Shaun, we agreed, but from franking machines, limricked, that in the end it may well turn out, we hear to be you, our belated, who will bear these open letter. Speak to us of Emailia. (410.20-23)”
“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”
“In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen. (419.9-10)”
“Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.”
“He caun ne'er be bothered but maun e'er be waked. If there is a future in every past that is present Quis est qui non novit quinnigan and Qui quae quot at Quinnigan's Quake! Stump! His producers are they not his consumers? Your exagmination round his factification for incamination of a warping process. Declaim! (496.34 - 497.3)”
“I’ve lapped so long. As you said. It fair takes. If I lose my breath for a minute or two don’t speak, remember! Once it happened, so it may again. (625.27 - 625.29)”
“End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. (628.13 to 3.3)”
“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”
“He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?”
“Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly's hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend's company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled: — It has not epiphanised yet, he said.”
“It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.”
“A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
“I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.”
“The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
“Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.”
“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”
“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.”
“Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past.”
“Can't bring back time. Like holding water in your hand.”
“The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
“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.”
“The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.”
“Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.”
“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.”
“I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.”
“A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.”
“Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the test of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory.”
“Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.”
“Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.”
“There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.”
“All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.”
“My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?”
“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.”
“Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.”
“I confess that I do not see what good it does to fulminate against the English tyranny while the Roman tyranny occupies the palace of the soul.”
“To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor.”
“Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honoured by posterity because he was the last to discover America.”
“Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul.”
“You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.”
“Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.”
“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”
“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.”