James Joyce Quotes

248 Sourced Quotes

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

James Joyce
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Joyce
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.

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

James Joyce
(...) 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.

James Joyce
Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

James Joyce
I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

James Joyce
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.

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

James Joyce
I should tell you that honestly, on my honour of a Near-wicked, I always think in a wordworth's of that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, A.G., whom the generality admoyers in this that is and that this is to come.

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

James Joyce
Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his wife for his friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters to the university of Oxtail.

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

James Joyce
When a young man came up to him in Zurich and said, 'May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?' Joyce replied, somewhat like King Lear, 'No, it did lots of other things too.'

James Joyce
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...

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

James Joyce
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

James Joyce
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

James Joyce
The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.

James Joyce